


Eighteen Again

by scriibblehere



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Eventual Smut, F/M, First War with Voldemort, Marauders, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:08:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 25,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28586256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scriibblehere/pseuds/scriibblehere
Summary: After Hogwarts, things fell apart for Lily Evans and James Potter. Three years later, when she shows up in his life to work for the Order, James finds himself pushed back towards her in a situation that's not only dangerous for his life, but also his heart. [First Wizarding War; Second Chances AU]
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	1. Chapter 1

The world exploded.

Well, if not the world, at least the room.

One moment, James Potter stood near the auction stage in a brilliantly-lit ballroom, holding a glass of champagne he very much didn’t want and speaking to a cluster of wizards he very much didn’t care for. The next, he found himself thrown backwards, directly into a row of plush banquet chairs arranged in a long line. He felt his back collide with the gold metal lining of one of the chairs— _hard_ —before he tumbled to the floor like a ragdoll.

From the polished wooden floor, he did his best to see through the smoke that had suddenly engulfed the room so he could ascertain exactly what the fuck had happened.

A second later, one of the three chandeliers that graced the domed ceiling fell and shattered spectacularly not twenty feet from him, which derailed his efforts entirely. The crash of metal and the breaking of glass and a sudden fire overcame the room—because fuck, _fuck,_ the candles from the chandelier had caught another line of chairs, which had gone up in flames almost instantly. James rolled over onto his stomach and pushed himself up, wand already in his hand before he’d gotten to his feet. He stepped away from the nearby chairs he’d crashed into, which hadn’t yet caught fire. He didn’t plan on taking chances there.

Pandemonium ensued to such a degree that he didn’t know where to go.

Screams filled the air with a thickness almost greater than the smoke. He could only just make out a blown-out hole in a nearby chunk of wall that stretched from ceiling the floor, large enough to drive two or three cars—Sirius’ passion—through. The edges of the hole had gone up in flames as well, which had probably caused the initial smoke.

He could just make out a few forms in the area directly around him, all moving quickly as if running, although not in any one direction. Panic had clearly taken over the ballroom that only a minute before had glittered with the fancy dress robes of some of the wizarding world’s best-connected witches and wizards. The constricting garments—and the heels for women, he had to assume—made for uncomfortable dueling wear, and based on the bursts of colored light that repeatedly flashed around the room, there was apparently quite a bit of that going on.

Not two minutes after the world had gone sideways, James got hit by the first spell.

It hit him from behind, landing right between the shoulder blades, and nearly knocked him back down. He caught himself just before faceplanting, and his adrenaline had taken over to the extent that he only felt a fraction of the burning sensation that would later overtake his back in full force. When he made as if to turn, a second spell clipped his elbow, and he felt the bone crack and then separate, a pain that reminded him suddenly and intensely of playing Quidditch, the only other time he’d ever broken a bone. The next spell hurt the worst of all, and almost sent him falling again. A searing pain hit the junction where his calf met his foot, just slightly above his heel. It didn’t burn like his back or throb like his arm, but stung, bright and sharp and horribly, more intense than any pain he’d ever felt before. A rush of warmth followed, which he could only assume came from a torrent of blood running down into his shoe.

He nearly fell again, and probably would have if he hadn’t acted. In the midst of his stumble, he Disapparated.

He landed on the lush green grass of his parents’ front lawn— _his_ front lawn by that time, yet even though it had been two years since he’d inherited the house, it still didn’t feel that way.

He shot a spell towards the door, and mere seconds after he heard it reverberate across the yard, Sirius Black stuck his head outside, wand arm aloft, and caught sight of him. Even from a distance, James could see his face drain of color.

“Oi, James is hurt!” he could year Sirius shout back into the house as he stepped out the door. “Get Lily!”

_What?_

Even through the haze of pain that clouded James’ brain, that broke through.

Lily _who?_ Surely, not—

“Gone not even an hour, Prongs,” Sirius chastised when he reached his side. He took in James’ crumpled form with one sweeping glance, his face chalk-white against the gleaming black of his hair. “What the fuck, did—look, I’m going to have to levitate you, and I swear I won’t run you into anything. On purpose.”

Despite it all, James chuckled. It ached in his throat, which felt rough from the smoke. As Sirius lifted him magically, sheer relief broke over his body regardless of the pain.

He’d gotten out.

“No idea what happened,” he told Sirius before he could even posit the question fully. “I was talking to this bloke from Albania one minute, and the next everything exploded. I didn’t see anyone, but had to be Death Eaters. Who else?”

A brilliant length of dark red hair caught his eye the second Sirius—with supreme caution, and not knocking him even slightly against the doorframe—levitated him into the house.

Lily.

_Lily Evans_.

James hadn’t seen her in three years, but she looked very nearly the same. Her hair looked different, longer than he remembered, with red waves flowing to midway down her back and fringe cut to frame her face, which swept like curtains that ended just above her eyes. Her eyes were exactly like James remembered, the same brilliant green he’d once stared into for hours. He assumed she had the same heart-shaped mouth as well, although she held the corner of her lower lip between her teeth as she looked him over just as Sirius had, although much more deliberately.

He had kissed that mouth more times than he could count.

He’d never stopped wanting to kiss her either, even after they had started fighting more than they’d gotten along, and even after they’d ended things.

“Put him on a chair in the kitchen,” she told Sirius, and she sounded the same as James remembered, decisive and confident and in total control.

Sirius took James that way without question. James had just enough time to see her head towards the grand, sweeping staircase that rose at the end of the foyer and flick her wand sharply.

“She was here when I got here,” Sirius explained before James could even ask. “Gideon and Fabian brought her two hours ago. She’s staying here for a while. I guess she agreed to staying at headquarters before anyone told her where those headquarters were, but she’s still staying. Merlin, how long has it been since you last thought about her?”

Truly, James still thought about her more often than he would admit.

They had lasted almost exactly eight months outside of Hogwarts. James counted six of those months as some of the best he’d ever had.

In the last two, everything had gone to hell.

If asked, he wouldn’t have been able to explain exactly what had changed, just that something had. The issue had almost always come back their schedules, although he’d never understood why it had become such a problem so suddenly and intensely. For six months, they had almost easily navigated the vacillating nature of her Healer training alongside his intense practice and game schedule as chaser for the Appleby Arrows. He had missed her like crazy, and she had sworn she felt the same, but the time they spent together had more than made up for the time apart, at least through his perspective.

At least, it had more than made up for it until, without warning, it hadn’t.

And once they’d started rowing…well, it had felt like the first six years at Hogwarts all over again, as if he’d never won her around seventh year. Truly, it had been worse. Back then, she had always gotten mad at him, never the other way around. With both of them angry at each other for the first time…

Well, chaos.

After they’d finally broken up—a long, drawn-out process that took weeks and only increased bitterness—he’d known that his friends had still talked to her. It would have been weird if they hadn’t, really. When he’d won her over, she’d known they came along as a package, and she’d fit into their group seamlessly. But eventually, he knew Peter stopped talking to her, and Sirius too, even though they never explicitly told him so. They had just stopped mentioning her, and neither of them had acted as if they felt badly for it.

On the other hand, he knew Remus had kept in touch with her, although that hadn’t surprised him.

He’d seen letters in her handwriting arrive to their flat, recognizable for her neat, curling penmanship even just from Remus’ name on the outside. They had continued arriving even months later, after James had done his very best to move on, and while he hadn’t resented Remus for keeping in contact with her, he had found it hard not to think about her at length every time a letter from her had arrived.

Thinking about her had at least momentarily derailed whatever romantic interest he had at the moment, no matter how hard he’d tried to avoid memories of her. That had become harder and harder as more time had passed, and he started forgetting the bad and only remembering the good of their relationship—of which there had been a lot.

Two years earlier, shortly before he’d quit the Appleby Arrows, he’d watched Remus receive one of those letters on a sunny Saturday morning in May.

_“Do you still see her?”_ he’d asked, unable to help himself, and Remus had nodded as he’d opened her letter.

_“Yeah.”_ He had sounded as if seeing her was the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it had been to him, although it hadn’t felt that way to James.

_“Is she still fit?”_ He hadn’t been able to stop himself there either.

The corners of Remus’ mouth had quirked up. _“More so,”_ he had answered. He’d gone off to his room after that, clearly at least a little entertained by James’ question, and entertained even more by James’ clear desire to press the issue. James had resisted the urge to follow him, but only just.

A year and a half before, after he and his friends had joined the Order of the Phoenix and James had offered up his parents’ empty estate as headquarters, his thoughts of her had become much more regular.

He’d begun overhearing Gideon and Fabian Prewett and Dorcas Meadowes talk about her from time to time, which had always put her in the forefront of his mind for at least a few days. He’d known his friends recognized it as well, because something in their faces had always shifted when they heard snatches of the same conversations. Peter in particular had always looked at James with deep concern at the mention of her name in their presence, which had left James more determined than ever to pretend he didn’t know who she was, and to never insert himself into one of the conversations about her, even though he’d wanted to.

He’d still listened, of course.

Gideon, Fabian, and Dorcas had usually laughed when they talked about her, discussing some story amongst themselves about something she had recently done, some of which (annoyingly, _so_ annoyingly) revolved around her dating life. He had heard fragments of their stories, unwilling to let them know he listened, and they had spoken of her with a warm fondness that had made his chest twinge strangely. It hadn’t escaped his notice that they hadn’t seemed to find it strange to talk about those things in front of him, almost as if they’d forgotten they had ever dated.

For reasons he hadn’t quite comprehend, he really hadn’t liked that.

He also really hadn’t liked the thought of her with someone else, even during the times he was with someone else himself. Truly, seeing another woman might have made him dislike thinking of her with another bloke even more than when he had no romantic prospect of his own. When with someone, he could imagine more easily the things that Lily had to get up to with whoever she dated—talking, laughing, kissing, shagging.

He’d done his best not to think about all that, but he’d listened just the same.

Other times, Gideon, Fabian, and Dorcas had looked serious and had kept their voices quiet, rarities for all three of them, and James had heard just pieces of their conversation as he had walked past them or entered a room where they sat. They had always stopped talking instantly then, and he had seen them do the same to anyone who had happened upon those conversations.

Almost as if conjured by his thoughts, Gideon and Fabian Prewett entered the kitchen seconds after Sirius and James. Gideon took one look at James and blanched, his shoulders physically cringing inward. He went to draw a kitchen chair quickly into the middle of the room, and Sirius placed James there with far more care than James was used to from his best friend.

“What happened?” Gideon asked. He and Fabian wore identical expressions of serious concern on their nearly-identical, handsome faces, and even after knowing them well for near eighteen months—in the middle of a violent war, no less—James could count on one hand the number of times he’d seen them look so troubled.

“No idea,” James said. The pain had left him nearly nauseous. “A wall got blown in. There was smoke and fire everywhere. I got thrown, and when I stood up, I got hit. All this happened to me in five seconds, maybe. If I hadn’t Disapparated, I would have gone down and not been able to get back up.”

Lily came in the kitchen after that, toting a large case in one hand. She set it on the floor next to him, and knelt directly in front of him. As she opened the top, James glanced down to see several different folding sections magically open up and spread out, rows filled with potions ingredients. With a wordless flick of her wand, a clear vial appeared from the dark depths of the case, which looked endless. With a second flick, a red bottle followed.

She uncorked the red one and handed it to him. “Drink this.”

In all the times he’d thought about her, he’d wondered what on earth he’d say to her if he ever saw her again, and what she’d say to him.

He’d never imagined the scenario in front of him, or anything like it.

“What is it?” he asked as he took the vial, and she shot him an irritated look.

“Poison, James. I’m poisoning you.” Her voice rang with heavy sarcasm as she uncorked the other vial. “That one will slow the blood loss. This one is for pain. Will you just take it?”

He did, and swallowed the next one too without complaint.

When she stood, he saw that just kneeling near his feet had left the hem of her knee-length linen sundress already stained bright crimson with blood.

“Your arm, your ankle, what else?” she asked.

“My back. I got hit with something that burns. Well, burned. It’s not as bad now.” His wounds felt instantly, remarkably better, all of them, even his loosely-dangling arm and the sharp pain that had never left his ankle. The prior pain had gone away almost entirely, and the other lessened, although still sharp and present.

“Poison will do that.” She kept her voice the same sarcastic tone, which sounded somehow normal and pleasant in an otherwise abnormal, horrible situation. It was entirely how she had typically spoken to him at school for the first six years, and had kept up even when they had dated and she had taken the piss out of him. “Can I vanish your jacket and shirt? I’m going to have to if you want me to fix your arm, but I feel obligated to ask.”

“Go ahead.”

She had undressed him before, of course. Countless times.

Just never under those circumstances.

Sirius seemed to have thoughts relatively similar, because he flashed James a grin the second Lily had her back to him. The color hadn’t returned to his face, but the grin reassured James like nothing else.

When Sirius worried, he worried. If Sirius could still find humor in the situation—well, that seemed much less concerning.

A second later, he sat shirtless. Lily disappeared behind him, and he felt her fingers on his back, gentle but purposeful.

Again, she’d touched his back before—clutching it in pleasure, typically—but never like that.

His head had started to swim.

“Someone should tell Dumbledore,” he said, and Gideon left the room, presumably to send a patronus to do just that. “What he’s after—well, seems like he’s not the only one.”

How much could he say in front of Lily?

What was she even _doing_ there?

“Arm first because it’s quick and you’ll just make it worse if I don’t fix it right away, then ankle, then back,” she said decisively. She came back into sight as she stepped to his injured arm, and then she was on her knees again, kneeling so she could examine the break more closely. “Would you rather I tell you what’s going on as I’m healing you, or would hearing what I’m about to do make it worse?”

He’d looked at her, of course, and saw only the top of her deep red hair. He could imagine the feel of it between his fingers without even trying. “I have no idea.”

“Well, ask me if you want to know. Otherwise, I’ll assume you prefer surprise. Look at Sirius for a second, will you?”

James followed her directions without thinking, and Sirius met his eyes for a moment before he saw Sirius look to Lily instead. In the next second, Sirius winced as a loud _crack_ bounced off the walls and ceiling of the cavernous kitchen, followed by a strange grinding noise unlike anything James had ever heard. Neither hurt, necessarily, although something had pinched in his elbow at the second sound. He hadn’t felt a thing with the first noise.

Just like that, his arm was healed.

“Move your fingers,” Lily instructed. “Is there pain?” she asked as soon as he obediently wiggled his fingers, her own probing along his forearm the entire time. When she got to his hand, she took it in her own and examined each finger herself.

Again, she’d held his hand before innumerable times, but under very different circumstances.

“No, it’s fine.” He went to stretch his arm straight, but she stopped him.

“Don’t move it too much yet. I know you’re shit at it, but try to sit still.”

Despite it all, he chuckled, and when she went to kneel again by his ankle, she glanced up at his face with the flash of a smile before he thought he could feel her fingers very lightly on the back of his calf.

It hit him suddenly that while Sirius, Gideon, and Fabian had all looked utterly stricken at the sight of him, pale and nervous and concerned, her expression and color had remained the same, almost as if they had happened upon each other in a shop in Diagon Alley. She looked somehow entirely unbothered.

Beyond that, he couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled at him. Had she smiled at him at all during those final, horrific weeks as their relationship had imploded?

Her composure and the mere sight of her smile _floored_ him.

“I’m going to vanish your shoe and sock and then cut the leg of your trouser to your knee,” she said after a pause.

“Sirius says you’re living here now,” he said as her wand traced a path up his leg, and the bottom of his trousers fell open with the practiced ease of an expert. She removed the excess fabric entirely and tossed it aside. His dress robes were black, so they didn’t show blood, but the wet squelch as the fabric landed that told him it was soaked with blood.

“For six to eight weeks, yeah.”

She’d stayed at his parents’ house numerous times when they’d dated. How she felt about living there—especially with them gone—he couldn’t tell.

“You’ll feel this,” she continued. “It won’t be pleasant. I can’t stop the pain entirely, because I need you to feel things so you can tell me if you suddenly don’t. Tell me if you go numb. Otherwise, I’m sorry for it.”

She glanced up at him again, and although he still felt nauseous, he had another thought.

He’d had her on her knees in front of him before. A lot. But never like that.

“She’s got one hell of a sense of timing, doesn’t she?” Fabian asked, and he’d clearly worked to get his customary cheer back onto his face. He dragged a second kitchen chair closer and sat on it backwards, arms folded across the top, to talk. James had the distinct feeling that he did so in order to distract him, and felt a rush of gratitude even as he felt a rush of pain from his ankle as Lily presumably touched him. “Can you imagine what Gid and Sirius and I would have done if you’d shown up like this? We’d have made everything ten times worse. You picked the right day to get nearly blown up, mate.”

“Dumbledore asked her to brew for the Order,” Sirius explained before James could ask. “Or that’s her cover story, at least. I think she missed our constant charm, but she won’t admit it.” He, too, clearly tried to sound upbeat, although he struggled more than Fabian did.

James understood completely. Sirius probably felt his pain near as much as he did. They were brothers, after all.

“Gid and I suggested her,” Fabian added. His grin looked undeniably proud. “Half because she’s brilliant at potions, and half because we’re still waiting for her to cave and give one of us a shot.”

The easy way he said it had James suddenly wondering if he truly didn’t know that he and Lily had once dated.

Fuck, maybe he _didn’t_.

“Your gran says I’m too good for you both,” Lily told him. There was a smile in her voice.

“Of course she does,” Gideon said, coming back into the room. “She favors girls. You’ve seen what Molly gets away with. It’s appalling.” His dark eyes swept over Lily and then James. A little of the color had returned to his face. “Sent the patronus to Dumbledore. Now, I guess we wait and watch Lily’s little medical show.”

“Or not,” she suggested. “You can leave me in peace so I can focus. I’d prefer it. James, I’m sorry.”

James didn’t have time to take her words in before he felt a sharp, almost blinding pain in his ankle. He heard a strange sound by his feet, something that almost sizzled, and he found himself clutching both fists so hard that he could feel his nails digging into his palms with enough force that it wouldn’t have surprised him to see that he’d drawn blood.

“The bleeding should stop,” she said, and the pain halted immediately. When she drew back, he saw blood all over her fingers, dripping towards her wrist, and her wand slick with it. She conjured a towel and wiped her hands on it, and then cleaned her wand as well. The fabric of the towel was black, he noticed, and he had to assume she’d chosen that color specifically not to show blood. “Unfortunately, this won’t be a quick fix. There are steps. I have to pause between each one to make sure the prior one holds, so it’s fairly lengthy. But it’s an easier fix than if you’d lost your foot entirely, so there’s that silver lining.”

“As cheerful as ever, Lily,” Sirius said with a snort. “I’m not sure why you’re—Dorcas, hello. You’re looking particularly angry this evening.”

James couldn’t see the doorway where Sirius looked, but he had to assume that petite, dark-haired Dorcas Meadowes stood there, and also that she looked furious. He’d seen the expression on her face countless times, both at Hogwarts and since they’d both joined the Order, so he could picture it well.

“Imagine my surprise at work today when Sturgis asked if I’d seen you, as he heard from McGonagall that you joined the Order,” she said without preamble, and even though he couldn’t see her, James knew she spoke to Lily. Her voice could have caused frostbite. “And I thought, no, there’s no way, she would have—James, what the _fuck_ happened?”

Gideon smothered a laugh. “Observant, aren’t you? Of course you wouldn’t notice, coming in here on a tirade—”

“Did you two know?” she demanded, not waiting for anyone to actually explain James’ injuries. “I have to assume you did.”

“Yeah, we suggested her again.” Fabian looked particularly pleased by that. “Helped convince her, too, so I feel like we’re definitely outshining you in the friend department.”

Lily didn’t look to Dorcas. Her eyes had gone to her potions case. She summoned a mortar and pestle, and then began to pull out ingredients. James recognized some of them from Potions at Hogwarts—the thin blades of fluxweed; the purple bulb of a squill; the long, white bones of what looked perhaps like a lionfish spine. Some things he couldn’t place. The several vials she pulled out had no markings to distinguish among them, although they were all a different color—purple, blue, light pink, dark pink, yellow. But there were ingredients he didn’t know too—a container of fine, brown powder; a dull green, mossy plant; several small, bright yellow mushrooms. Lily turned to the side, next to her case, and began lining them up in front of her methodically. The lionfish spine went into her mortar first, and she began to grind it with sure, practice movements.

“I made the decision last night, and just got here two hours ago, Dory,” she said, eyes on her work. “I didn’t have the time to write, but I knew I’d see you soon enough. Relax.”

_“Relax?”_ Dorcas repeated. “I’ve wanted you here with us for _ages,_ and now you’re finally in and you _didn’t think to tell me_? Any of you?” James had to assume that she tossed the latter part at Gideon and Fabian. “What happened to Madam Rue?”

Gideon and Fabian once again went somber.

“Dead,” Lily said shortly. She had reduced the lionfish spine to a fine white powder, but kept grinding. “Dragon Pox. It took her quick, thank god, and I had the potions to make it easier than most cases. She didn’t suffer too terribly, and I was able to keep her at home. She wanted to go there, and I’m glad that she could.”

James’ stomach lurched. Images of his own parents swam before his eyes, their lined faces covered in the customary green-and-purple rash, skin tinged green underneath, with great, boiling blisters spread across every inch of their bodies that he could see.

Near two years had passed, but he still thought of them in their last moments so often that he sometimes forgot what they’d been like before those final hours.

A brief silence filled the room.

“Our gran’s cousin,” Fabian explained, presumably for Sirius and James’ benefit. “A potion maker. Lily apprenticed for her. She and Gran lived next door to each other, which is why Gran favors Lily. They’re basically best mates.”

That answered the question as to why Fabian and Gideon knew Lily so well. When he’d overheard them talking about her with Dorcas over the past several months, James had just assumed that Dorcas brought her up—they were best friends at Hogwarts, after all. Four and five years older respectively, Fabian and Gideon had only overlapped two and three years with them at school. Before he’d joined the order, James couldn’t recall ever speaking a single word to either of them, but they clearly knew Lily well.

“What happened to Healer training?” James asked.

She uncorked the yellow vial and tipped the contents into her mortar, which she then began to mix into a thick paste. “I completed two of three years,” she said, and once satisfied with the paste, she set the mortar and pestle down and turned back towards his ankle.

“And then?”

Her face disappeared as she bent to examine his injury. “And then they mysteriously stopped allowing muggleborn students into courses. We all had to drop. It was the strangest thing.”

Her voice very much implied that it _was not_ the strangest thing. She sounded bitter.

The kitchen again went silent.

“It’s holding fine,” she added a moment later. She went to push her hair out of her face using her elbow, her hands presumably again covered in his blood. He didn’t look to see. “I’m going to keep—”

She broke off with a laugh, a bright, pretty sound he’d always gotten intense pleasure from coaxing out of her. Without thinking, he had leaned forward to push the length of her hair out of her face for her, the action more muscle memory than conscious thought. Her hair felt smooth and silky and entirely familiar between his fingers, and he tried to ignore the little thrill that shot through the pit of his stomach, present even over the pain, just from touching her.

“Sorry,” she said. She glanced up at him. “I’m not laughing at you or your pain. I just… normally when I’m on my knees and a bloke touches my hair—well, it’s very different. You know that.”

From the moment Sirius started laughing, James doubted that he would ever stop.

Heat crept up James’ back and into his face, but he found himself laughing too, and he heard Gideon, Fabian, and Dorcas join as well.

Had she known that he’d had a very, very similar thought about her?

He didn’t doubt it. She’d always read him easily.

Well, at least she’d laughed.

“I missed you,” Sirius said to her, and he looked as if he truly meant it. He kept laughing, and James watched tears collect in his eyes from it all. “We were all thinking it, so thank you for finally saying it. Honestly, I was considering injuring myself a little so you could look up at me like that.”

Fabian made a hand gesture that very much implied, _same._

“Go fuck yourself,” Lily said, the words easy and light and friendly. “James, I’m sorry.”

The pain resumed. It felt just as sharp as the last time, seemingly reverberating up James’ leg, into his knee, up his thigh, into his hip. He made an involuntary noise, something akin to a hiss, because he could swear that he felt her fingers probing inside his ankle, deep in tissue unmeant for exposure to air.

The laughter died off Sirius’ face briefly, but when he saw James looking at him, he did his best to grin. “Still foul-mouthed, isn’t she? Although I suppose she’s said worse things to us both.”

She absolutely had.

“It’s part of her charm, don’t you think?” Gideon asked. He sounded truly fond, and he winked at James. He, too, clearly sought to provide some sort of distraction or relief. “She’s said things to us so harsh that they could peel paint off a wall.”

James didn’t miss the careful way he looked between him and Lily.

He looked surprised, like he had only just remembered that they were once more than just casual housemates from Hogwarts.

James wasn’t sure how to take that, exactly, but he couldn’t see it as a positive, no matter how he tried to spin it in his head.

“You both deserved it.” Dorcas had come around, and James watched her pretty face pale when she looked him over carefully. She rested against the edge of the kitchen table, the pose supremely casual, but her knuckles turned white as she gripped it. “What happened?”

Fabian spoke so James wouldn’t have to. “Some sort of explosion. We sent word to Dumbledore. Had they started the auction?”

James shook his head, not trusting his voice, and also unable to wrench his teeth apart.

What the fuck would he have felt if Lily _hadn’t_ given him the pain potion?

No one spoke until Lily pulled her hands away, and James let out a giant breath he hadn’t known he held.

“How are you doing?” Lily asked. James found her green eyes on him, wide and openly concerned.

His head swam a little more, because, _fuck,_ she was beautiful.

“Hanging in there,” he said, because he couldn’t conjure a decent lie. “Tell me what you’re doing.”

“You’re sure?” She sounded skeptical.

“Yes.”

She went back to her mortar and added another vial of something, a thick, green liquid that plopped as it fell. “The ankle is relatively complex to restructure,” she said, and he watched her begin to carefully mix the ingredients. “Blood vessels, muscle, joints, tendons, nerves, ligaments, bone—there’s a lot that can go wrong when you’re healing. I’m taking where you were cut and building from the inside out, fixing the damage there. There’s layering to it, like fixing a cake.” She paused. “Did I just ruin cake?”

He found himself smiling a little. “Kind of. At least for a while.”

“When did Madam Rue die?” Dorcas asked abruptly. She still held onto the table staunchly.

The sudden change in topic didn’t throw Lily for a second. “A little over two weeks ago.” She summoned a silver knife and a cutting board from her case, and began to dice the fluxweed into pieces so fine they appeared almost translucent. The knife looked like it stuck to the tacky blood on her fingers, but she moved with the speed and precision the likes of which James had only seen in their old Potions Master, Horace Slughorn.

“So where have you been?”

“I helped their gran settle Rue’s affairs.” She nodded towards Fabian and Gideon. “I stayed at her house during that time. It took a bit.”

“And then? What did you do?”

“She stayed with us a couple nights,” Fabian said. He grinned triumphantly at Dorcas, as if he’d won something. He had, clearly, because she looked outraged. “Oddly enough, she found our constant company—how’d you put it, Lil?”

“Devastatingly erratic.”

Sirius snorted. He didn’t disagree.

“You should have come to mine.” That was clearly the crux of the matter. The words came out clipped from Dorcas’ mouth, her lips pursed immediately afterwards, as if she wanted to keep going but physically stopped herself.

“And deal with how put out Jack would have gotten?” Even from profile, James could see Lily’s eyebrows raise. “Pass.”

Jack was Dorcas’ boyfriend of over a year. James had met him twice, and found him forgettable each time.

“Does he dislike you?” Sirius asked, clearly intrigued.

“No,” Dorcas answered for her immediately, and she scowled when Lily gave a soft, disbelieving laugh. “He just thinks she’s—”

“Difficult?” Lily suggested. She summoned a small scale from her case, and carefully measured out half of a gram of the diced fluxweed, which she added to her mixture. “Don’t even bother coming at me for that, Dory. He’s said as much to my face. So have his mates. I’m incredibly unbothered over it, but I wouldn’t want to stay with you because I know it would make the whole vibe of your flat very, very weird.”

Dorcas opened her mouth and then closed it. She clearly had no retort.

“Why didn’t you stay with Dr. Rick?” she asked after a moment. She spoke the word ‘doctor’ with a lilt to her voice, obviously trying to lighten the moment.

Her tone also very much suggested a familiarity that made James deeply, distinctly, and unreasonably uncomfortable.

“We broke up.” Lily opened the blue vial. She used the stopper attached to the cap to add two drops of dark, almost black liquid to her mortar. “Can we have this conversation later? Tempting as it is, I’d rather not injure James in my attempts to heal him, which means I need to focus, and this—”

Dorcas heaved a great sigh and pressed a hand to her forehead.

“Wait, when?” Gideon demanded. “You didn’t tell us that, and you were with us for _days_ , Lil. Well, good on Dr. Handsome Rick for making the rare six-month mark. When did—”

“Enough.” Lily didn’t look embarrassed, just annoyed. “I’m not getting into this.” She turned back to James, and she ducked her head to examine his ankle again. “This is going to hurt the worst,” Lily said, lifting her head for a moment. “It’s all nerves, and that—well, it’s unpleasant. Once we’re past that, the worst is over.” He thought he could feel her fingers very lightly on his calf, just above where his wound stung sharply. The smile she flashed him looked cheeky, clearly meant to lift his spirits. “You can touch my hair if it makes you feel better,” she said, and he couldn’t help it. He smiled in return.

The pain hit James instantly, with the force of a sledgehammer to the back of his head.

Somehow it ached even back there, as far away from his ankle as possible. His entire body ached, and stung, and throbbed. His hands went to clutch the sides of his chair, and he straightened his recently-healed arm to do so. His elbow protested just a little. It felt tight, as if he’d held onto a broom for several consecutive hours, but otherwise it didn’t hurt at all, a welcome change. He tried to remind himself how much better his arm felt.

The pain was worth it. With pain came healing.

That sent him immediately back to thinking about his mum and dad, who had died in their bedroom just down the hall.

Losing them had hurt more than the wounds that dotted his body.

It hurt even then.

Lily’s hair gleamed in the kitchen light. He wanted to touch it, of course, but he didn’t. He held onto her offer too, right along with his desperate mantra of healing. She’d meant it teasingly, designed to distract him no matter how she felt about him, and it worked. It helped fill his mind with other things than the way his body screamed.

As she hurt him worse than any physical pain James had ever felt in his life, a thought flashed across his mind.

With her charm and her skill, she would have made an incredible Healer. He’d always thought so, but he’d never seen or experienced it firsthand.

Seconds passed, and then minutes, and the hours, and then weeks, and then months.

That was how it felt, at least.

He heard himself swear, and he lifted his good arm to press over his mouth to avoid saying anything else. The tension in his fingers and the pressure on his face grounded him.

Then, suddenly, the pain ended.

“You did well,” she said, and she sounded warm, almost gentle. “The worst is over. You did great.”

Yeah, she had great bedside manner. He felt an unwilling flicker of pride at her praise, despite it all.

He shook slightly, and tried to control the tremors as she prodded around the front of his calf and his foot, her touch light and probing.

“Is a doctor a muggle Healer?” Sirius asked. He’d gone pale again, and he looked determinedly at Lily’s face. James didn’t doubt he’d thrown out the question to distract himself.

Dorcas joined in immediately. “Yes. She’s an idiot for throwing that away. Rick is stupidly good-looking, makes great money, and he _dotes_ on her. How many times did he come to the bookstore and try to chat you up before you agreed to go out with him, Lil? He was so persistent. I can’t believe you just—”

“I’m working.” Lily said. She’d gone back to her mixture, and James watched her begin to dice up the bulb of a squill. “You’re all very welcome to take Sirius and go discuss the intimacies of my love life elsewhere.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Gideon dodged the Look she gave him, A Look, a proper noun. “Of the muggles she’s gone out with, he was the best,” he told Sirius, studiously avoiding Lily’s face. “We only hated him a little, and that was mostly on principle.”

“When did you dump him?” Fabian asked. There seemed no question that she had broken up with him, rather than the other way around.

Lily didn’t answer, her silence pointed.

“You’re working at a bookstore?” James asked, and when she looked at him, she appeared almost relieved at the change in topic.

“Yes. A muggle one. It’s only a few times a week, but I like it. It’s easy to build my brewing schedule around, and—”

“—and it’s great for her ego, because blokes chat her up _constantly,”_ Gideon said. “I’ve seen it. It’s wild, although I’m not surprised. I mean, I go there to see her too, so I get it. But you should see some of these muggle blokes when she starts talking books with them—it’s hilarious. It’s like they expect that a fit girl shouldn’t know how to read, and they’re _stunned_. Dr. Wonderful Rick was one of the worst about it all. He spent _hours_ —”

Lily set her mortar and pestle down heavily. “Out.”

Somehow, she packed a serious punch behind the single word, enough that Gideon’s face immediately sobered.

“Lil—”

_“Out._ Do you think this is fun for me right now? I’m glad you’re all having a laugh while I’m trying to fucking fix James so he can walk again.” She had flushed, her color suddenly a soft, glowing pink. “Go have that laugh somewhere else. I normally don’t give a fuck when you take the piss out of me, but _not right now_. Get out.”

Fabian looked the most stricken, and immediately apologetic. “Lil—” he tried, just as Gideon had a moment before, but he stopped at the sharp way she pointed to the door.

“Out. I’m not joking.”

All of them, even Sirius, listened.

“Sorry.” She leaned forward, and her hair fell in front of her face. After a brief glance at the bloodstains on her hands, she sighed, and pulled her hands through her hair anyway so she could pile it on top of her head and secure it there. The color of her hair obscured any traces of blood, but a light smear smudged at her hairline, bright and red.

James tried his best not to stare at it. “I don’t think you’ve ever apologized to me this many times.”

“I’ve never had to.”

Her tone hadn’t resumed either the brisk business or the light sarcasm or warm gentleness he had come to expect. She still sounded a little brittle, as she had when she’d banished everyone else from the room. That quality of her voice reminded him wholly of teasing her at Hogwarts until she’d broken, stopped ignoring him, and kicked off. He’d stopped hearing that tone seventh year, although it had come back around full circle by the time they’d ended things.

“I’m sorry for bleeding on you,” he said, and the corner of her mouth quirked.

“You’re lucky I’ve gotten better at getting out bloodstains.” She ducked her head back towards his ankle. “Pain again.”

He steeled himself, but she’d spoken true. After the pain just prior, her work hardly hurt. It still hurt like a bitch, of course, but in comparison, it was like falling off a broom versus getting hit with a bludger. Both hurt, but falling always hurt much, much worse.

He still breathed harshly when she paused again and the severity of the pain vanished, replaced by the constant undercurrent he’d almost gotten used to. “Six to eight weeks?” he pressed, picking up an old thread of conversation.

She knew what he meant. “Yes. It depends on how long a couple different potions take. They’re based on the lunar cycle, but it’s experimental, so it’s hard to know. I’ll probably need to hit two full moons, but we’ll see.” Her fingers flashed deftly as she continued adding ingredients to the paste in her mortar. “Thank you for letting me stay, although you looked surprised to see me, so I’m assuming you had no idea.”

“I didn’t,” he admitted. “But it’s headquarters, so no one needs to ask my permission.” He paused. “But I would have said yes if anyone had asked me, for the record.”

His answer would have been more like a resounding _hell yes,_ because he’d always lost it a bit when it came to her. The other Marauders had gotten after him for it constantly at Hogwarts. They hadn’t fully understood why he’d wanted her as intensely as he had, and truly, he hadn’t either. He’d just found himself drawn to her like a flitterby to a flame, captivated by the length of her neck and the grace of her limbs and the brilliant sheen of her hair and the uniqueness of her eyes and the engaging sound of her laugh.

Pain and all, just looking at her made him feel eighteen again.

It sounded like he wasn’t the only bloke who found her captivating. He never had been, but he’d had it fairly easy at Hogwarts, because few blokes seemed willing to ask her out and potentially—definitely—annoy him. Aside from a few short-lived boyfriends, he’d rarely seen anyone openly flirt with and admire her like Fabian and Gideon just had, their intentions joking or not. He really couldn’t tell with them.

She stood, and he saw that her hem had gone redder. Blood had also smeared a little down one bare leg, but she acted as if she didn’t notice. Truly, maybe she didn’t.

He’d seen her covered in his fluids before, but never his blood.

That thought sent him nearly into laughter that felt almost hysterical in his chest. He only just held it down.

What a fucking _day._

She went behind him to his back, mortar in hand. “It’ll sting a little,” she warned, and she gave him just enough time to absorb that information before he felt a thick, strangely cold product spread between his shoulder blades. As promised, the muscles in his arms and shoulders immediately tensed at a fresh, sharp burst of pain, but it only lasted a few seconds, maybe ten at most. Then the pain ebbed away, replaced by only a blessed coolness. “You’re lucky I caught this now,” she said, and he could feel each of her individual fingers as she continued her application. “This would have continued to spread without treatment. It’s a really nasty hex. Rare, too. They weren’t messing around.”

“Thank you.” He hadn’t planned the words, but he meant them deeply. “For all of it, and for doing your best to distract me through it with jokes and banter, even though…you know.”

Even though he’d doubted before that day that she’d ever speak to him again, truly.

“You’re welcome.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“You’re going to bruise back here,” she added, reaching down to touch his mid-back. Sure enough, even though he could only just feel her fingertips, the pressure ached. “I can heal the bruise once it forms, if you’d like. And, well, we’ll know about the state of your kidneys if you start pissing blood. Do let me know if you do.”

He didn’t know if she meant it seriously or joked, and he didn’t really have it in him to ask.

She went back in front of him and sat down again. He watched her meticulously clear the floor around her that she’d used as her station. She cleaned her silver knife and cutting board with a flick of her wand, returned the remnants of ingredients with another, and vanished the few scraps that remained.

“What happens after six to eight weeks?”

She looked surprised at the question, and then immediately guarded. “That’s hardly your business.”

“I’m injured. Feel sorry for me and humor me.”

He hadn’t expected it to work, and it didn’t, not entirely, but she did almost smile. “It’s hard to say,” she hedged. “I have a couple different options. I’m kind of at a crossroad right now, and I have a lot to figure out, so I couldn’t tell you even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”

She still sounded just a little brittle, but less so.

He wondered if she ducked her head to examine his ankle in order to avoid the topic. Even if that wasn’t her intention, it certainly worked that way. “I’m very nearly done,” she said. The brittleness faded entirely, and she sounded pleased. “There’s tissue and the issue of mending your skin, but that’s nothing. And then I’ll want you to stay off it, even though, like I said, I know firsthand that you’re shit at sitting still. I’ll need to check it in the morning, assuming you don’t wreck everything tonight and make me start all over.”

On one hand, he very much didn’t want to go through all that pain again.

On the other hand, he very much didn’t mind her attention. At all.

Fuck, how stupid was _that_ sort of reaction?

“This shouldn’t hurt as bad,” she said, and he could feel her fingers more fully on the front of his ankle, as he really hadn’t before, when he’d only barely felt her touch before. “I’ve been told it tickles, so try not to kick me.”

She had often accused him of kicking her in his sleep. Did she remember? The way she spoke, he couldn’t tell.

It did tickle a little, even as it hurt, but the pain continued to dissipate. He could hear the quiet murmur of her voice as she cast spells that hit him in different ways, some deep in his muscles and some tingling on his skin and some pinching his nerves.

He had _feeling_ back, and, fuck, he hadn’t even truly realized just how much he’d lost it.

“Don’t move your ankle,” she instructed sharply as she sat back up. She tipped her head to the left and then right, stretching her neck. “But try to wiggle your toes.” He could feel them move, and the smile that split her face made her look eighteen again, as she’d looked when completing a particularly complex spell in Charms or acing a truly difficult potion. It made his chest ache with an unexpected fierceness that nearly knocked him over.

“Are you done?” he asked, forcing the words past the sudden lump in his throat.

“Very nearly.” She summoned one last vial from her case, conjured a rag, and dabbed a bit onto it. She held the cloth to the back of his ankle. “Essence of Dittany. It’ll help bind the skin together, because—well, you were missing a lot, which makes what I’ve healed more fragile. I’m not sure if you’d want to know this or not, but I have no idea how you Disapparated given the state you were in. Like I said, at least you didn’t lose your foot entirely, but—it was close.”

His stomach roiled in protest. He had purposefully refused to look down and see exactly what had happened, but the imagine she conjured to mind of his foot dangling loosely from his leg by the thinnest threads of the skin of his ankle—

Fuck.

She continued her cleanup. She wiped her fingers one last time on the towel she’d conjured, and vanished it along with the Dittany-soaked rag. She cleaned her mortar and pestle and packed them away into her case, which closed with a _snap_. He had to assume that she cleaned up the area around him to remove the blood, based on the way her eyes swept the floor and her wand twirled, and then he felt warmth on his leg, which told him she’d probably cleaned his leg as well.

“Like I said, I don’t want you moving it.” With another flick, thick bandages appeared, wrapping from his toes to a third of the way up his calf. “Not for the rest of the day, at least. Figure out where you want to sit and stay there. No stairs, and don’t even walk that much on flat surfaces. Make Sirius help you go wherever you want to go. It might humble him a bit, which would be good for him.” One final flick sent bandages around his torso too, wrapping entirely around where she’d applied the salve. “I’ll check that in the morning too, but the burn should be gone by then. Oh.” She opened her case again, and summoned out another clear vial, which she held out to him. “For pain. You might not need it, but I expect your ankle will start aching by morning. Your arm might be sore for a little while, so don’t overtax it either. Questions?”

For starters, how the hell was he ever supposed to repay her?

Second, did she still hate him, as she’d looked like she had when they’d parted for the final time?

He didn’t hate her. He never had, not really. Once he’d gotten past anger, he’d quickly taken to missing her more than anything.

“No.” He paused. “Thank you. Again. Really.” The words fell entirely short.

She nodded and stood. “It’s nothing.” She really did make it sound that way. After she crossed the kitchen floor, he heard the door swing open and her lift her voice. “Sirius! Come act as James’ servant. He has tasks for you.”

When Sirius reappeared, he joined Lily at James’ side. The tentative expression on his face sat strangely, distorting his features. “You’re alright?” he asked, and the two simple words rang with raw, gut-wrenching concern. He laughed with relief when James assured him he was, a loud exhalation of breath whooshing from his lungs. “Lily, I don’t care that you’re all covered in blood. I could kiss you.” He really did look at her like he meant it, his mouth slightly open and his eyes awed. “How did you _do_ that?”

“Magic.”

“Everything good in here?” James recognized Fabian’s voice before he saw him. When Fabian came into view, James saw that his color had returned to normal, and when their eyes met, he looked utterly relieved. “Glad you’re okay, mate,” he said with simple honesty. He slung an arm around Lily’s shoulders. “Have my children,” he said to her, and she didn’t look surprised by the words. Her mouth twisted with suppressed amusement when she looked up at him. “You’ve seen me and Gid. We need some intelligence back in our family line. Take pity. Help us out. Have my children.”

James could only stare.

Sirius let out a bark of laughter. “Little strong there, innit?”

“He’s been worse.” Lily nudged Fabian’s arm off of her and reached up to take her hair down. James watched with poorly-concealed interest as it tumbled down her back. “I’m going to shower and finish unpacking. There are things—”

“Go to dinner with me and Gid,” Fabian prompted. “Dorcas has to go meet Jack, so she’s out, and you know he’s shit company by himself. Don’t subject me to that. I promise we’ll only minimally harass you about Dr. Nice Guy Rick. I do need to know when you dumped him, though, because I’m very aware that I only have a two- to six-week window to try to get at you before you agree to go out with some other bloke. I need to know how much time has passed so I know how much time I have left. It’s simple clockwork, Lil.”

She ignored the latter part of his words. “Go ahead and take the piss out of me. I don’t mind. Just not when I’m literally up to my wrists in blood. That’s my line. I think it’s reasonable.” She bent and picked up her potions case. “I’ll do dinner. I’m going to shower. James, remember—find a place to sit or lay and sit or lay there. Don’t ruin all my hard work. I’ll be much less kind if I have to do this all over again.” Without another word, she left.

Sirius helped James to the den where Gideon and Dorcas sat. He chuckled all the while. “You kind of look like you’re considering moving in for the next six to eight weeks,” he said when he deposited James in an armchair. He flicked his wand, and several seconds later, a t-shirt came flying into the room, summoned from James’ old bedroom. It was a blue Appleby Arrows shirt from before he’d played for them, back when they’d just been his favorite team. It felt strange to pull on, but his arm ached only minimally when he did so. “The lads and I wouldn’t miss you at all. Can’t wait to see their faces when I tell them she popped back up. Remus’ll be thrilled.”

Dorcas took one look at them and left the room. James had no doubt that she’d gone off in search of Lily.

“We already told her we’re considering moving in,” Gideon said, nodding towards Fabian as the other half of that ‘we.’ “She said she’d find somewhere else to stay if we did. Apparently we make her drink too much, which was part of what made staying with us so erratic. I can’t imagine what she means.”

He spoke with all manner of innocence that James didn’t buy for a second. He knew firsthand _exactly_ what she meant.

“Do you know what she’s brewing for the Order?” he asked, and Fabian turned a hand over in a gesture that clearly imparted, _no idea_. “You suggested her to Dumbledore?”

“Yeah. We met with him over that recon we were doing in Dorset, and he mentioned that he needed a potioneer for something.” Fabian ran a hand over his thick, dark hair. “We didn’t think she’d go for it, since she and Rue stayed pretty busy with Rue’s mail-order potion business, but then Rue got sick not long after…” He looked, again, more serious than James was used to seeing. “We were lucky Gran didn’t catch Dragon Pox too. I have no idea how she didn’t, because she and Rue were always together. She’s fucking devastated.”

Gideon looked almost identically grim. “I don’t know what we would have done if Lily wasn’t there. She knew how to take care of Rue, and then she took care of all the rest after. She’s still working through estate stuff with Gran.” He shook his head a little, and did his best to grin at James. “You dated her, didn’t you? Do I have that right? Do you have any tips to help Fabian and I out? I think Gran might disown us if one of us doesn’t bring her into the family.”

Fabian saved James from having to come up with some sort of coherent answer to Gideon’s questions, or to really think about what it meant that Gideon had to _ask_ if he and Lily had dated, instead of just knowing. Gideon had phrased the question entirely offhandedly, as if James were simply another prior suitor in Lily’s life, something casual and fleeting that hadn’t mattered.

That didn’t describe their relationship _at all_.

“I wish I had a camera to get your face when she made that crack about being on her knees,” Fabian said, grinning. “That was truly something.”

Sirius snorted. “I mean, we were all thinking it. I was just surprised she said it.”

“She said she’d do dinner,” Fabian added to Gideon, who looked supremely pleased.

“Excellent. I want to know what happened to the doctor, even though it was bound to happen sooner or later. She’s not cut out for the muggle thing, even if she—”

A silver, opaque patronus appeared so suddenly that James jumped. _“I’ll be by tonight,”_ the phoenix said with Albus Dumbledore’s voice, and then it dissolved into a mist.

Save for James’ very confusing feelings about seeing Lily, the room had lacked the sort of tension that had begun and lingered since he had appeared in a crumpled heap on the lawn. Suddenly, that tension reappeared, and ratcheted up significantly.

“Be nice if he’d say when,” Sirius said, shaking his head. “Loves to create a mystery, doesn’t he?” He sat down in a nearby armchair and leaned forward, his gray eyes intense. “James, what happened? Go through it slowly.”

James did his best.

He’d been in battle before, and more than once. Skirmishes with Death Eaters happened all over Britain, and with increasing frequency. A couple months before, he’d only just made it out of a burning home in a muggle village, where he and several other Order members had gone to halt an attack in progress. The smoke then put that the fire and smoke in that evening’s ballroom to shame, as he’d almost passed out from it while running through the house. When he thought on it, he could still almost conjure the reeking scent of burning polyester as the muggles’ couch went up in flames.

Weeks before that, he and a few other Order members had gone to stake out a warehouse storing hundreds of wizarding artifacts preparing for sale.

Death Eaters had had the same idea.

Masks and all, James had wondered if he recognized some of them from his own year at Hogwarts. He had almost thought he could spot Severus Snape’s hunched posture, or Arwell Nott’s gait, or Thomas Avery’s showy, impractical arm movements as he cast that weakened his ability as a dueler. Remus had been with him then, and James had laughed aloud when Remus had shot a particularly well-timed spell that caught the possible Avery right in the chest and threw him backwards. Remus had rolled and ducked behind a brick partition right afterwards, but James had caught his grin, bright and almost vicious. They always altered their appearances before conducting any sort of Order business, so he hadn’t looked like Remus in the least, but the grin had somehow been all Moony, more werewolf than man due to his savage pleasure. James had to assume that they all looked that way when they battled. Even Peter, usually so mild-mannered, went severe in combat. Sirius, on the other hand, typically laughed like a madman, which was perhaps the most terrifying reaction of all.

Weeks and months before that, James had encountered numerous other battles—in the streets of Diagon Alley more than once, just outside Hogsmeade another time, in a deserted stretch of muggle London another, and on and on. He remembered only fragments of each time, which came in deep, graphic memories. Remus’ grin felt imprinted on his brain. The spells that the possible Snape had thrown at him, one after another after another after another, also felt carved into his mind. The frequency of the casting had had him convinced that, altered appearance or not, Snape could recognize something in him as well. He could see exactly the imagine of the artwork on the wall of the muggle home he’d escaped, a large, abstract canvas, which had gone up in flames with surprising speed. Yet much of the rest of it remained a blur, a wild, rushing tornado of chaos that tasted like bitter adrenaline and coppery blood, filled with a cacophony of loud explosions and crackling flames, and burned almost blindingly with flashes of brilliant spells.

That evening felt exactly the same. What he did remember— the laughter on the Albanian wizard’s face moments before it all went down, the ear-splitting crash of the chandelier falling to the floor, the searing pain in his ankle—he remembered well.

The rest blurred together into one tense, horrific mess.

Still, he tried to walk through it the best he could. Explaining things to Sirius, Gideon, and Fabian, he found that he recalled more than he thought.

He didn’t think the explosion that punched a hole through the wall had been the only one. He thought it might have accounted for the initial chaos, but he remembered a secondary explosion rocking the floor as he had Disapparated.

Although all manner of spells had burst around him, evident by the multitude of colors he witnessed clearly through the smoke, he never saw the telltale green flash of the Killing Curse. Clearly, then, the attack had meant to frighten the auction’s participants, not kill them.

Whoever had attacked him from behind also clearly hadn’t meant to kill him. If they had, they could have easily.

Sirius had once again gone pale at that.

“Do you think the cup was there?” Gideon asked, and James could only shoot him an exasperated look. “Sorry. You couldn’t know. Just— _months_ of trying to find that damn thing, and Dumbledore’s right, they very clearly want it too—”

“Wish he’d tell us why everyone wants that nonsense,” Sirius muttered. He rubbed his face vigorously with his hands. “Sodding old Hufflepuff relic that no one should even care about—I don’t get it.”

“Like that though, isn’t he?” James felt suddenly very, very tired. His adrenaline, which had spiked at the auction and hadn’t abated thanks to both Lily’s presence and her healing, had dropped all at once. “When he wants us to know, we’ll know.”

It probably should have bothered him more that, without a reason why, Dumbledore had sent him on a wild goose chase for _months_ in hopes of tracking down a lead to the whereabouts to the cup of Helga Hufflepuff. It sat in the hands of a private collector, apparently, and the collector had plans to move it to market sooner or later. As head of the Potter family, James had had an easy enough time garnering invitations to the ridiculous social events necessary to gain access to that information, but he’d loathed the work, which was only part of his mission there.

_Months_ playing that game, never daring explain exactly what he looked for for fear of tipping off Voldemort and his Death Eaters, and finally, when things had started to look promising—

Fuck it all.

Despite the fact that Dumbledore had very nearly gotten him blown to bits, James didn’t hold even a bit of grudge against the headmaster for sending him into chaos with no clear reason. Dumbledore had never lead him wrong before. He trusted he never would.

When Lily and Dorcas reappeared, they both looked a little more at ease than before. Clearly, they had set to rights whatever strangeness had passed between them in the kitchen.

“Kind of preferred you with the blood, to be honest,” Sirius told Lily with a grin.

“I’d be happy to make you bleed, if that’s what you’re asking after.” She smiled in return. “I need to stop at the apothecary,” she said, looking to Gideon and Fabian. “Do you want me to meet you somewhere?” When neither of them answered right away, she understood immediately. “Are you needed here?”

“Dumbledore sent word he’d be by sometime,” Gideon explained. He sounded truly remorseful. “I think we—”

“No worries.” Lily went to the fireplace, and James watched her begin to alter her appearance. “But I have to stop by your gran’s to sign some paperwork. I’ll make sure to tell her you both blew me off. I expect she’ll get past that and forgive you both eventually.”

“This is why you’re her favorite. You sabotage the competition.”

Lily flashed Gideon a smile through the mirror. “Now you’re getting it.” When she turned around, James wouldn’t have recognized her if she passed him on the street. She’d charmed her hair a glossy brown nearly as dark as Dorcas’, and turned her eyes brown as well. Aside from the color of her eyes, she’d also altered her mouth into a fuller pout, very slightly changed the shape of her nose, and sharpened the cheekbones in her heart-shaped face. Her skin no longer glowed as radiant and pale, but glowed for its sudden warm tan, which contrasted wonderfully with the soft blue of her dress. “It has nothing to do with her seeing me far more than she sees you both. Not a thing.”

Neither Gideon or Fabian looked surprised at her transformation. A glance at Dorcas confirmed that she didn’t either. Sirius, on the other hand, stared at her with the sort of confusion that James knew had to read all over his own face.

“You were fit enough even without the blood,” Sirius said, and she looked at him quizzically in return. “Why the change?”

“Oh.” She rummaged through her handbag, but came up empty from whatever she searched for. James had the sneaking suspicion it was a stalling technique, and that she looked for nothing. “I never really was popular with the Slytherin crowd, and you know where most of them ended up, so that’s always been an issue. But I also…said some things I shouldn’t have and angered some people when I left St. Mungo’s. I meant it all, but it wasn’t smart to say. If I’m going anywhere in the wizarding world, but especially in Knockturn Alley, I can’t look anything like myself if I don’t want to risk an ambush. Kind of hard to miss with my hair, you know? It’s easier this way. Anyway.” She waved a hand as careless as her words and made for the door. “Stay off your feet, James!” she called after her, and she was gone, Dorcas trailing after her.

“Rue made her alter her appearance to make trips to the apothecary,” Fabian said after they heard the front door close. “Rue insisted she go to the one in Knockturn Alley. Always said it was better-stocked.” He sounded a little sad, but fond just the same. “I’m glad she agreed to it. It’s better than the alternative: fight a constant fight or leave. Mary Macdonald just straight up moved to a few months ago because she couldn’t handle it.”

James remembered shy, blonde Mary Macdonald, of course, although he hadn’t known her as well as he knew Lily or Dorcas. Of the Gryffindor girls in their year, she had shrunk a little into the background, and was the only other muggleborn student aside from Lily in their house and year. Although they’d been very close, she and Lily had operated on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of how they treated their blood status. Mary had acted only too happy to have no one so much as notice her for any reason, but Lily had never shied away from attracting attention academically and socially, almost as if she dared someone to say something about her parentage.

James hadn’t even known she’d left, but he could imagine Mary running from conflict at the first opportunity.

Really, he didn’t blame her that much.

“Rest, mate.” Sirius looked again uncharacteristically concerned and serious. “We’ll wake you when Dumbledore gets here.”

James knew he wouldn’t fall asleep. He couldn’t, not after everything that had happened in the previous few hours, and when he sat in trousers that still smelled faintly of smoke, the scent of which came off his hair as well. Beyond that, he sat in his dad’s armchair, and while he’d sat there many times before over the past twenty-two years, he’d never slept there. No, only Fleamont Potter had ever slept there, usually reclined on a weekend afternoon or in the late evening after nodding off during a Quidditch match.

Further still, he hadn’t slept in his parents’ house since they died. He had wholly planned to never sleep there again, because time spent there even during waking hours felt strange enough. He couldn’t imagine how it would feel to wake up there again. Would he forget their deaths in the first few moments of the morning? Would he open his eyes, stretch, and stare at the ceiling of his childhood bedroom with the absent wonder of what they were up to? And would it all hit him at once and come crashing down—that they’d fallen ill without him there, that they’d gotten worse before he came home, that they’d fallen into unconsciousness before he could speak to them, that they’d died within hours of each other without ever opening their eyes again?

He didn’t want to find out.

Yet against his certainty—and against his better judgment—he nodded off with alarming ease.

**xxx**

When James awoke, the first thing he noticed was Lily Evans sitting on the settee nearby, her brilliant hair contrasting wonderfully against the dark green velvet.

So she wasn’t just a pain-induced dream. She really sat there.

The second thing he noticed was that Albus Dumbledore sat nearby her on a squashy purple chair that he’d conjured for himself, even though had had access to several other seating options. He held his wizened hands steepled, and he was deep in quiet conversation with Gideon.

The third thing he noticed was Sirius, because Sirius had seen him wake up almost the second his eyes opened.

“Was starting to think she actually _had_ poisoned you,” Sirius joked. Truth be told, he did look relieved to see James awake and more or less alert. “You’ve been out hours.”

“How are you feeling?” Dumbledore asked, and he sounded genuinely concerned.

“In one piece.” James reached up and rubbed his eyes. They felt dry and gritty. “That comes down to Lily. She set me straight.”

“So I heard.” Dumbledore waited for James to resettle his glasses before he went on. “Tell me what happened tonight.”

“Before that—” Although he hadn’t seen her in nearly three years, when Lily spoke, she wore an expression unlike any James could remember. She looked and sounded uncertain, the polar opposite of the confident, self-assured way she’d always carried herself. He’d never once seen that confidence so much as falter. “I’m going to leave before you get too far into it all, but I had this thought tonight—”

“Even if you choose not to stay with us long-term, you’re welcome to listen.” Dumbledore had fixed her with his piercing blue stare. “I have no issue with that.”

“What?” Fabian asked sharply, and James watched him shoot his brother a startled glance. “What does that mean, ‘not staying with us long-term’?”

Lily ignored him. “I appreciate that. Truly. Just the same, what happened today and why it happened aren’t things I need to know, so I’ll step out. But…” she hesitated. “Gideon said you’re looking for something. Some wizarding relic. I don’t need to know what, but I wondered…have you considered Knockturn Alley? You can buy information there on just about anything, as long as you can pay the right price and you have the right connections and you know where to look.”

A tense silence filled the room. Lily and Dumbledore stared at each other, clearly waiting for the other to speak.

“Go on, please,” Dumbledore prompted finally, his voice polite, but James didn’t miss the keen nature of his gaze.

“It’s possibly nothing. _Probably_ nothing. But—have you been to Moribund’s?” When Dumbledore gave a short nod, she went on. “The man who runs it—a Moribund, I don’t know his first name—works with all manner of magical products and oddities and antiquities. If you’re not sure exactly where to locate whatever you’re looking for—well, I just wouldn’t rule out trying to get someone into Knockturn Alley to see what they could shake loose. Moribund could maybe help in that, if you played it right. He’d sell his own teeth right out of his mouth for the right price if he trusts you won’t run to the Ministry. So would Borgin at Borgin and Burke’s. I might go there first, actually. Now that I know him pretty well, he’s always open for a chat.”

“Why were you in Moribund’s and Borgin and Burke’s?” Gideon asked. “I thought you only went to Knockturn for the apothecary.”

She stood and shrugged. “Rue sent me other places too. I mostly bought illegal potions books and equipment. I got to know Borgin and Moribund well enough that they remember me in my altered appearance, and they seem to like me well enough. I’ve chatted with them a decent amount, so we’re friendly.” She didn’t look ashamed over it at all, even though the Head Girl James had known at eighteen would have disemboweled herself before admitting to any sort of rule-breaking in front of a professor. That went double for the headmaster, and for the severity of her confession. She’d broken _law,_ apparently, not school rules, but offered the information with an ease that left him staring. “I’m to bed. Professor, I have what I need to start brewing tomorrow. I’ll update you with my progress.”

Dumbledore inclined his head in thanks, and Lily went to leave the room. “Lily?” he called after her, and she paused in the doorway, fingers drumming on the doorframe. “Would you be willing to approach Moribund and Borgin about this?”

She opened her mouth, then closed it and stood, unmoving.

“I could,” she said, the words entirely hesitant. “What would you have me do?”

If James had a better hand muggle idioms, he would have thought that Lily had just signed a giant blank check she probably wouldn’t want Dumbledore to cash. But he didn’t know many muggle idioms, so he didn’t know what to think of the situation _at all._

In return, Dumbledore just smiled, and inclined his head again. “We’ll talk about it in another day or two, after you’re settled. Thank you. I’m grateful you’re here.” He waited for her to leave before he looked to James. “Tell me about tonight,” he prompted, and James forced himself through it all again, the entire debacle of the evening’s events.

His head had started to hurt.

When he finished, Dumbledore didn’t speak for a long time. Because he sat silently, the rest of them did too. Finally, Dumbledore leaned forward in his chair, his face unusually sharp. He looked suddenly less like a kind, elderly grandfather and more like the man who had defeated Grindelwald, like a powerful, accomplished wizard no one would want as their enemy.

“I have it on good authority that Voldemort is after relics that belonged to Hogwarts’ founders, not just Helga Hufflepuff’s cup,” he said. James’ heart began to pound, adrenaline creeping back up. The way Dumbledore spoke, it sounded as if he divulged a great secret, one of those key pieces of information he held back until it was absolutely necessary for someone to know. “He’s begun to search for a diadem that once belonged to Rowena Ravenclaw. Just like with the cup, I’m still not sure to what end, although I have my suspicions and will share them when I know for certain. I found this out just this evening, so I have not even the slightest clue where the diadem might be, except to know that it’s not in his hands. Yet. We need to make sure it doesn’t fall there. I expect the attack tonight was meant to give the Death Eaters the chance to search for both the cup and diadem before they sold, if they were in fact there. As of an hour ago, I know that they had neither in their possession. I’m hoping it’s stayed that way.”

_“_ How do you know all this?” James asked.

Just because he didn’t resent Dumbledore for keeping them in the dark about a lot didn’t mean he wouldn’t press him for information when and where he could.

“We have eyes in their camp, at least to a certain extent,” Dumbledore said, and despite the pain in his head, James leaned forward expectantly. Around him, he saw Gideon, Fabian, and Sirius do the same. He wondered if they too held their breath. “I can’t say more than that,” Dumbledore went on, and James exhaled all of his hope. Dumbledore heard and interpreted the sound correctly. “I understand how frustrating that must be. I’ve asked for your trust and cooperation to the point that you all have put your lives on the line for this cause. I only hope you’ll continue to extend that trust, with the assurance that I will share anything I know for certain as soon as I know it, and only hold back what I absolutely must.”

James didn’t hesitate. After all, if they couldn’t trust Dumbledore, who _could_ they trust?

“What’s my next step?” he asked, because he didn’t need to say more than that.

“Heal,” Dumbledore said after a grateful smile. “And let me think on the rest. For certain, I will send Lily to Knockturn Alley. I’d like you to go with her. It might also be wise for her to go with you once the dust settles and another auction gets underway. If she knows her way around Knockturn Alley and its inhabitants, having her at your side can only help you in these matters.”

James watched him stand and vanish his chair. “I think you’ll need to tell her that we’re going to do this together. She’ll take it better than it coming from me.”

If he didn’t know better, James could have sworn Dumbledore nearly smiled.

“Of course,” he agreed immediately. “I’ll write her so she knows first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll talk about it with you both in the next couple of days. I’m sure we can come up with a perfectly reasonable explanation for your public partnership as well.”

Yes, he _certainly_ almost smiled at that.

“Heal,” Dumbledore repeated. He patted James’ shoulder as he went to leave. “Thank you, James. I’m glad you’re alright.”

The eight words shouldn’t have hit James quite as they did, but he found himself suddenly, intensely touched.

For a moment after Dumbledore left, the four of them didn’t speak.

Finally, Sirius looked to James with a certain twist of a grin. “How do you plan to explain to your girlfriend about why you’re galivanting in public with Lily?”

Oh.

Oh, _shit._

_That_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Week One:**

James awoke the next morning to find himself in his dad’s recliner for the second time in twenty-four hours.

Just as the night before, the first thing he saw was Lily Evans.

Again— _he hadn’t dreamt her there._ She really was there.

In the haze of sleep, he found himself more pleased at the prospect than anything else.

It helped that she’d woken him with a touch on his arm and then immediately gone to vanish the thick bandages around his ankle, once again on her knees. The sight left his stomach in heated knots in a way that he hadn’t fully felt the night before, in too much pain to really, _seriously_ think through the last time he’d seen her kneel before him—and the time before that, and the time before that, and the time before that—

Whatever their problems, the physical side of their relationship had never lacked.

If anything, it might have been _too_ good.

Long after they’d broken up, once he had actually seen things logically without a sense of overwhelming loss that had clouded everything else, he had understood that they probably should have worked harder to fix what they had, or ended sooner if they couldn’t fix it. Instead, they’d spent the last two months together arguing about their long absences in each other’s lives and the lack of time they both had for each other, covering the same ground over and over in circles.

He hadn’t wanted to call things off with her because he loved her, even if she had infuriated him like no one else he knew, but also because he hadn’t wanted to stop shagging her. Something about the way she had looked at him sometimes after they repeated their dance of fight, shag, fight, shag, had told him that she felt the same way. They’d only ever been with each other at that point, but even without other experience, he had somehow _known_ that he wouldn’t easily find their chemistry with someone else—if he _could_ find it elsewhere. He’d thought it improbable even then.

He’d been right, at least for himself.

Looking at her on her knees, he had to wonder if she felt the same.

“I have to go to work,” she said without preamble, her fingers light on his ankle and her face suddenly obscured by her long hair as she bent to examine his injury. “Wiggle your toes. Does it hurt at all?”

“No.” His voice came out thick with sleep, and he could hardly believe the lack of pain. “Feels tight, but that’s it.”

_Tight._

He wrenched his eyes away from her quickly.

_How_ did she make him feel eighteen again, like a horny teenage boy who couldn’t control his thoughts or think about anything except the way it used to feel to watch her swallow after he came?

Well, really, he probably wasn’t that different at twenty-two. But _still_.

“Roll your ankle slowly, will you? Slowly.”

_Slowly_.

Fuck, he was a mess.

Sirius sat up from the settee and gave a long, languid stretch. “Hell of a terrible sleep,” he said conversationally, as if he woke up to the sight of Lily on her knees before James every day. Somehow, his hair managed to fall in place perfectly no matter the state of his rest. James could only guess how his own looked. “Lily, what did Dumbledore mean last night when he talked about you not sticking around long-term?”

Well, _that_ got to the crux of the previous evening quickly.

Had Sirius even slept, or had he just laid perfectly still with his eyes closed, waiting to hurl the question at her?

She ignored him. “Does any of that hurt?” she asked James as he rolled his ankle as directed. When he told her it didn’t, she nodded. “Flex your foot up and then point it.”

Women didn’t normally ignore Sirius. In fact, James couldn’t think of a time he’d _ever_ seen a woman ignore him.

Sirius clearly didn’t take well to such a change.

“Evans!” He picked up one of the small, decorative pillows he’d tried to use as an actual pillow and threw it at her.

Euphemia Potter would have _eviscerated_ him for that.

It hit Lily square in the back of the head. She clearly hadn’t expected it, and it sent her nearly face-first into James’ lap. In turn, Sirius clearly hadn’t anticipated such an outcome, and surprise and delight read all over his face and colored his instant laughter.

Lily whipped around immediately, and _thank Merlin for small favors_ , because James hadn’t anticipated the pillow or the outcome, and if he’d already thought about her mouth around his cock—well, those thoughts suddenly felt tame in comparison to the heated snarl of desperate desire that flooded his entire body.

“You watched me heal your best mate last night,” she said to Sirius, her voice like ice. In turn, James felt almost unbearably hot. He reached up to rub his face just so he could cover it, and hoped the clear blush he felt climbing his back would dissipate before she turned around again. “Have you considered that knowing how to heal bone and reconstruct blood vessels and muscle and nerves means I also know really, really well _how to take those things apart?_ I could _destroy_ you, Sirius, and I’m about five seconds from it. It’s too early and I’ve just read _too much shit_ from Dumbledore to deal with your antics. Never mess with me while I’m healing, but especially today. I’m not in the mood. Don’t push me.”

A testy silence followed.

“Your foot,” she prompted, her voice still brittle, and James resettled his glasses on his face so he could look at her. Beyond that, he looked to Sirius, who looked torn somewhere between amusement and a little bit of fear. “Does that hurt?”

“When I flex up, yeah.”

“I expected it might. Relax your foot.” She used both hands to feel around his ankle and up into his calf, no space left unexamined. “That’ll pass. There’s no numbness?”

“No.”

“Excellent.” She stood and James realized what she wore for the first time as she brushed down the front of a soft lavender dress that bared her shoulders.

She’d owned it four years before, which left him feeling eighteen _yet again_.

No specific memory stood out in that dress, nothing James could place exactly. But the sight of it had him remembering the hot days of the summer after they’d graduated, when they had spent every waking moment together before the chaos of his Quidditch career and her Healer training had started in real earnest. It made him remember tumbling in the grass with her in Hampstead Heath, and her lifting her skirt higher so she could wade in the park’s swimming ponds, laughing all the while. It made him remember the first week after he’d moved out of his parents’ house into a place he rented with the other Marauders, when he and Lily had basically disappeared into his bed for days on end, desperate to make up for all the nights they hadn’t had together at Hogwarts. It made him remember stretching out on the couch with her in the flat she had rented with Dorcas and Mary MacDonald, his fingers in her hair and her breath warm on his neck, as they talked about their future—the places they would go and the things they would do _together_.

They’d never gotten to do any of the things they had planned.

“Your arm feels entirely normal,” she said, and when her words jerked him from his reverie, he found her fingers on his arm. “Stretch it, move it around. Does it hurt at all?”

It didn’t.

She went to his back next, and he scooted forward in the recliner so she could pull up his shirt and vanish the bandages. He felt a sudden warm, trickling feeling, and had to assume she’d removed the salve she’d applied the night before.

“I should have said this last night,” she said, and her tone had shifted entirely. She sounded almost gentle, as she had only briefly the night before after she’d finished the worst of the healing. He should have anticipated where she planned to take things, but he didn’t, entirely distracted by the soft movement of her fingers, which felt only too similar to the way she had often stroked his back in bed. “I was so sorry to hear about your parents,” she said, and his throat constricted immediately. “I know it doesn’t compare to anywhere close to how it felt for you—and for you too, Sirius—but I mourned them deeply. It falls short to say it, but they were wonderful people. I really loved them. I’m very sorry for your loss. And yours, Sirius. I’m glad you had each other to get through it. I know they would have been too.”

Sirius’ amusement faded entirely. He looked to James, as if he expected him to speak first, but it only took a single glance at his face to push ahead for them. “Thanks.” He shifted on the settee and sat forward a little, clearly uncomfortable with the intense seriousness of it all. “It was hard. It’s still hard. It always will be, I expect. This is the first night we’ve spent here since. Prongs passed out the second Dumbledore left.”

Lily knew him as Prongs, of course. She knew all of their Animagus forms, and thus the nicknames that came with them. She was the only other person outside the four of them who did, and to hear Sirius call him Prongs in front of someone outside the Marauders—

Well, that hardly helped the lump in James’ throat.

“You can go home whenever. Just no stairs. Make Sirius levitate you if you need to.” Lily lowered his shirt and came back into James’ line of sight, her wand twirling absently between her fingers. She looked softer than she had since James had seen her, the remnants of melancholy present in the corners of her mouth. “I’ll still want to check it later today, probably when—”

“There’s no way.”

James recognized Remus’ voice before he saw him. Really, it didn’t matter that James saw him at all, because Remus had frozen near the doorway to the den, his eyes on Lily. He looked as if he’d seen a ghost—but a ghost he liked, clearly, because he began to smile a second later.

“I know I haven’t seen you in forever, I know I owe you a letter, I know I’m a bad friend—” Lily laughed as she spoke, and she left Sirius and James forgotten behind her as she crossed the room to Remus. She went right into his open arms, her own around his neck with easy familiarity, and her laughter only increased when he picked her up just a little as he hugged her.

“I got a much less warm reception,” Sirius said dryly, glancing towards James, although he quickly looked back to Remus and Lily. He looked like he didn’t know if he should laugh or not.

James didn’t feel like laughing.

He’d known they had kept in touch, but he hadn’t anticipated seeing something like _that_.

“You owe me two letters,” Remus corrected, letting her go. The smile that split his face detracted from the severity of the scar on his left cheek, which ran nearly from temple to chin. He’d aged the fastest of them all, and usually something in his disposition or face made him look older than twenty-two, but he suddenly looked young again. “Even Dorcas said she could hardly get ahold of you. If I hadn’t asked the Prewetts, I might have thought you’d dropped off the face of the earth. When you meant to do the muggle thing, I didn’t know you meant it so _entirely_. How long did you last?”

“Just over eight months. I really think everyone should try it at least once.” She reached to touch the scar on his cheek. “That’s new. I’m sure it hurt.”

Remus shrugged. If his scars bothered him, he’d never shown it. “It wasn’t too bad. What are you doing here?”

“It’s a long, boring story, and I need to get to work.” She paused. “I’m working the café area this morning. Come with me. No one’s there this early. All the free coffee you want.”

“Sure,” Remus agreed. He didn’t even really stop to think about it, and only then did his eyes flicker to Sirius and James. “Can I meet you there? I feel like there’s probably a good reason why Prongs has a t-shirt on with his dress trousers.”

“That’s a less boring story.” Lily went back to James’ side, and he watched her pick up a brown leather handbag he hadn’t noticed before. She flicked her wand, and bound his ankle once again in bandages, only those softer and more flexible than the night before. “You can walk some, but don’t overdo it,” she said, and she sounded more brisk and less excited. “Again, no stairs. Like I said, go home, but I’ll want to check it again tonight, so if you could come back sometime after six, I’d appreciate it. I don’t plan to track you down if you don’t.” She paused for a second, and then stepped to pick up the pillow Sirius had thrown at her. She threw it back twice as hard, and he only just had time to hold his hands up to defend his face. She laughed. “You heard me with Fabian and them last night. Don’t fuck with me while I’m healing! That’s my line!”

Sirius shot her a cheeky grin. “Can I fuck with you the rest of the time?”

She smiled in return. “At this point, I expect it. I think I’d be rather disappointed if you didn’t.” She patted Remus’ arm on her way out of the room, and left.

“Prongs—” Remus went and took up an armchair as soon as they heard the front door close. The warmth and pleasure that had brightened his face had vanished, and the concern that replaced it left him looking older than twenty-two once again. “What _happened?”_

Telling it all the third time around, James decided that someone else would have to explain it all to Peter. He was tired of repeating the same events over and over again.

“Fuck.” Remus swore sometimes, certainly, but James thought it always sounded strange nonetheless. It juxtaposed too sharply with his usual mild manner. “You’re lucky—fuck, you’re lucky for _so many_ reasons. And you’re fine? Really?”

“Yeah.” He nodded towards the door. “She fixed me up and made it look easy.”

That brought Remus to the next point of business. “What—”

“She’s brewing something for the Order, no idea what,” Sirius said before he could even finish. “She’s staying here while she does it, six to eight weeks, she said. Last night Dumbledore made it seem like she might leave after that, and she wouldn’t give me an answer when I asked today. And Prongs lost his head the second he saw her. You should have seen it, Moony. His foot’s just barely hanging on and his arm’s dangling broken, and the second he looks at her—gone. Can’t you imagine it?”

Remus chuckled. “Yeah. Yeah, she’s always done that to Prongs, hasn’t she?”

“And now that she’s saved his life? He’s even—”

“Padfoot.”

Sirius stopped at the sound of James’ voice. Surprisingly.

“Dumbledore wants her to work this relic hunt with me,” James told Remus, and he thought it looked like Remus had to fight back a smile.

“Was that his idea or yours?”

“His!”

“But Prongs didn’t complain,” Sirius said. He didn’t bother hiding his grin. “Not for a second. Dumbledore apparently already wrote her about it, because _she_ complained just a bit ago. It’s like she remembers how they used to row, but he’s forgotten that and only remembers how they used to shag.”

“Fuck off, Padfoot.” James knew he sounded short, but he didn’t care. Sirius had hit something a little too close to a nerve.

“Just saying, mate. The _second_ she got on her knees to look at your ankle last night—well, we all saw it. She did too. Why do you think she made that crack about blowing you? She knew it would distract you, and she was right.”

Remus stared. “She what now?” he asked, and by the time Sirius was done explaining, he laughed nearly as hard as Sirius. “I expect Fabian to turn up mysteriously injured within the next…three days,” Remus said, still laughing. “I wouldn’t put it past Gideon either, but Fabian’s smarter, don’t you think?”

“I made a similar joke myself,” Sirius said brightly, and James knew half that brightness came from Sirius willing him to also take the joke. “C’mon, Prongs. It’s going to be a long few weeks if you can’t laugh at how badly you want to shag her. You’re going to have to either laugh about it or avoid coming here entirely, and I don’t think you have the strength to stay away. Although, again—girlfriend, Prongs. You’ve got one. Seems like you like her, and you fight a lot less than you did with Lily.”

Nothing Sirius said was _wrong_ , exactly.

He had a girlfriend.

He liked Esther. Really, he liked her more than every other woman he’d dated since Lily, bar one.

He and Esther never fought. Not once.

And yet—

Why the fuck did Lily get to him like she did? And without even _trying?_

“She stopped by late last night,” Remus said, pulling James from his increasingly frustrated thoughts. “Esther,” he clarified, and Sirius snorted, because it was clear that James hadn’t followed who ‘she’ was at all. “She said you were meant to go to hers and she hadn’t seen you.”

Oh.

Right.

“What’d you tell her?”

Remus shrugged. “I hadn’t seen you either, because I hadn’t, but that Sirius was gone too, so I assumed you were together.”

“Nice cover, Moony,” Sirius said sarcastically. “Remind me to never ask you to lie to a bird for me.”

“No one asked me to lie,” Remus pointed out. “No one even told me I _needed_ to lie. I didn’t know Prongs had almost gotten himself set on fire and then had his head totally turned by Lily. How was I to know that?”

“You’re meant to say that your head isn’t totally turned,” Sirius said when James didn’t immediately protest Remus’ characterization. He chucked the decorative pillow at James’ head. “You’ve seen Lily for a collective _hour and a half_. Don’t fucking go off the deep end. Look, I really like Lily—”

That didn’t sound like a promising start.

“—and I get why she gets to you. I get it. Just—don’t go all in with her. She was nice to you last night, and bantered with you and all, but we all kind of thought you were about to bleed out on the floor. I expect she would have made that crack to anyone at that point if she thought it would have helped. It’s not _you_ , mate. Moony here has a better shot at her than you do. Hell, _I_ could throw my hat in that ring and come out—”

“I hear you.” James took a deep, steadying breath. “I hear you, okay? That’s enough. You’re right. Esther’s great and we get along well and I like her.” Still, after a brief, testy silence followed, he couldn’t help but ask, “Moony, why was she doing the muggle thing?”

He had a sneaking suspicion he already knew, but he wanted to hear Remus say it.

Everything about the way Remus looked away, uncomfortable for the first time, confirmed it all to him.

“She was dating a bloke.” His words came out clipped, and James caught the look in his eyes as something wary.

He didn’t exactly blame him. He’d never kept his head well when it came to anyone else liking her—and, hell, most blokes at Hogwarts had simply stayed away to avoid dealing with it.

He suddenly very much missed that luxury.

“The muggle Healer?” Sirius asked, and Remus’ wariness vanished immediately into surprise. “The Prewetts and Dorcas were taking the piss out of her last night.”

“They must have broken up then.” Remus didn’t look surprised, but a little sad. James tried not to take that too personally. “That’s not the—wait, if Lily’s here, what happened to Madam Rue?” It seemed to only just hit him, and his face sharpened, suddenly severe. “Did she—”

“Dragon Pox.” James couldn’t remember if he’d said the words aloud since his parents had died. They tasted bitter on his tongue. “Two weeks ago, she said.”

“Fuck.” Remus stood. “Prongs, I’m glad you’re okay. Really, really glad. But I need to go see if _she’s_ okay, because I know she’s not.”

“I still don’t understand who this woman was,” Sirius said. “Kind of makes it hard to care that she died.”

Perhaps saying ‘Dragon Pox’ had left him feeling vulnerable, but the brutal honesty in Sirius’ words made James flinch.

Remus ran both hands over his prematurely-greying hair. “She’s famous old potioneer, I don’t know— _was_ some famous old potioneer, I suppose. She took Lily on as an apprentice after she couldn’t continue at St. Mungo’s, just when Lily thought she might not ever find work in our world again. Lily was devoted to her for giving her that shot. She moved in with her, even, a while after her parents died and Madam Rue got ill last—”

Remus’ words hit James like a bludger to the gut. _“What?_ Her parents—Moony, she just talked about mine. Just now. She didn’t say—”

“Why would she?” Remus let the question hang there. “Car accident near a year ago. She and Petunia don’t speak anymore. Both devastated her. Prongs, can I go now? Is there anything else you want to know, or can I go tell her I’m sorry for another devastating loss in less than twelve months?”

“Go. Sorry. Go.” Remus got nearly to the door before James spoke back up. “Moony.” He fully expected Remus to loathe him for it, at least temporarily, but he couldn’t stop the words. “What was he like? The muggle bloke? Did you ever meet him?”

He very studiously avoided looking Sirius’ direction, especially after he heard him sigh.

“ _Really_ , Prongs?” Remus stared at him for a moment, but then clearly saw that he meant it. He sighed too. When he spoke, he sounded tired. “I met him once on accident. He brought her lunch by the bookstore where she works. I was there. He knew who I was, so I knew he listened when she talked, because he knew a lot about me and he had committed it all to memory. We talked about football. They liked opposing teams, but he still took her to see hers play as often as he could. He has a dog. They walked it together. He tried to work up the nerve to ask her out for weeks before he did. She said no the first time. He liked that. She said yes the second time. He might have told her he loved her before he left, I don’t know. I tried not to pay attention to that, because I’ve seen her with other blokes since you two broke up, but it’s still weird. Can I go, or do you want me to go through every detail of her dating history for three years, at least as far as I know it?”

Given Remus’ ridiculously good memory at any and all things school-related, James expected him to at least remember the bloke.

He probably should have expected an essay of an answer, but he hadn’t, and he felt something in him collapse a little.

It all sounded so blissfully _domestic_ , the sort of things he and Lily had once bandied around together and had never gotten to do.

“Yeah. Go.”

Remus didn’t even wait for him to finish. He left at the first syllable.

“She always did like him best,” Sirius joked after a delicate pause. He stood. “C’mon. Let’s go home. I’m starving, and you should probably figure out if you’re going to try to patch it with Esther or not, and if you are, what you’re going to tell her when you start taking Lily to all the pureblood nonsense. If you’re lucky, I might trust you just to handle it yourself and not even come back here with you when Lily’s off work.”

**xxx**

Sirius didn’t trust James to handle himself, of course.

“Honestly, Prongs, it’s not even that,” Sirius insisted when James asked him point-blank exactly what Sirius expected him to do if he wasn’t there. He grinned. “I know I told you not to go all in with her again, and I meant it, but…it’s still funny watching you trip over yourself around her. I’ve never seen you like it with any other bird.”

Truthfully, only Lily had ever made James nervous. He’d never gotten that gut-wrenching, heart-pounding feeling around any other woman. When that didn’t come again with anyone else after they’d broke up, he had at first attributed it to not being over her, which would have made that sort of care for someone else impossible. After a while, he had wondered if maybe he had had enough experience with Lily that he just knew what to do with other women, which left no room for excited anxiety.

When he stepped into his parents’ house that evening and heard Lily’s laughter, he realized that it was just _her_ , and that was infinitely worse than anything else he could have imagined.

“Don’t fucking get soppy,” Sirius muttered as they approached the kitchen, and James should have expected why he said it, but he didn’t see it coming at all.

At the sight of her, nostalgia crashed over him like a tidal wave. She sat at the kitchen table with her feet propped up on the chair next to her. The room smelled like the half-eaten shepherd’s pie still on her plate, and he didn’t doubt that she’d made it herself. Her cheeks had gone rosy with laughter and whatever sat in the bottle at Fabian’s elbow, a glass of which she held in her hand.

How many times had she sat in his parents’ kitchen with him like that, with Euphemia and Fleamont just in the other room, or sometimes there with them?

For a fraction of a second, he thought maybe that was it entirely. Maybe the way she’d left him flummoxed had everything to do with those feelings of seeing her in his parents’ house and the memories attached to them. After all, he’d introduced one other woman to his parents, but he’d never brought her around like he had Lily. Of course seeing her back there would trigger all those feelings again, of the warmth and comfort and happiness of the time before he’d lost them, back when he’d easily taken them for granted—

The thought soothed him, because that meant he could understand it. Further, it would mean that when those feelings would vanish as soon as they weren’t in his parents’ house together.

That feeling fled entirely the second she looked at him, and nerves flooded his stomach instantly.

Yeah, that wasn’t it. At least not _entirely_.

“You’ve made the joke more than once,” she told Fabian, standing. She pulled the chair beside her own rather further away than necessary, and nodded to James wordlessly. “That makes it less of a joke.”

“No, Gran made it once and then I made it once, and only after she’d said it, so it’s less terrible.” Fabian looked and sounded far too upbeat for James’ liking, to the point that he found it rather difficult to return his grin with the ease that he usually did. “Alright, lads?”

“Lily, I’m much less likely to harass you when you’re healing if you feed me,” Sirius said, eyeing with interest the tin that held the rest of the shepherd’s pie.

“Shoe and sock,” Lily said briskly to James. She reached around him for her glass. “Knock yourself out, Sirius, but I’m telling you the same thing I told Fabian. This is a one-time thing. I’m not about to make it habit. I’m not setting myself up to be some sort of bizarre housewife here, or—”

“Is that what you used to be at our place? A housewife?” Sirius summoned a plate from the cupboard and a fork from a drawer. “Because you cooked there a lot, and I—”

“It absolutely was _not_ what I was there, but you know it. All you’re doing is making me regret past kindnesses to you, which makes me want to rescind future kindnesses before they even happen.” She knelt again at James’ feet, and he again felt an annoying thrill climb up his spine. “Pain today?”

“No, it’s been fine.” He watched her bend to look at his ankle, pause, and then sit back up to tie her hair on top of her head. He tried to ignore the smothered way Sirius laughed. “And I’ve stayed off it. I even didn’t take the bait of Sirius’ twelve stair-racing challenges.”

He wished he could see if she smiled. “Go through everything we did this morning,” she instructed, and he couldn’t tell from her voice. “You know—rotate your foot, point, flex, all that.”

“That smells lethal,” Sirius said, and James watched him pick up the bottle at Fabian’s elbow to give it a sniff. He sounded more intrigued than anything else. “Never pegged you for one who’d try to get a girl sloshed to have a crack at her.”

Fabian laughed. “Nah, it’s not like that. I mean, I wouldn’t tell you no, Lil, for the record—”

“ _I’m_ telling _you_ no.”

He didn’t look put out. If anything, he looked like he enjoyed her banter, or maybe the way she glanced up at him through her fringe. “Yeah, well, the next time you might say yes, so I’ll keep at it. No, I’m trying to get her sloshed so she’ll tell me her plans after she’s done brewing here, but getting her to talk to me is harder than getting her to shag me—and before you get the hump about that, I’m not calling you easy, Lil. It’s obviously just even harder to make you talk about something you don’t want to than it is to shag you. I don’t have to have gotten you to do either to see that. I wish you were a little easier in both ways, to be honest—or a lot easier, I wouldn’t—”

“Did any of that hurt?” Lily asked, her fingers probing the back of James’ leg.

“No, it’s fine.” James really hoped he managed to sound less irritated than he felt.

“I think you’re good.” She stood. “I’d still rather you not have those stair races anytime soon, but I think you’re fine to climb them if you’re not stupid about it and if you stop if it hurts. I’ll want to look at it a final time in another couple days, but it should heal on its own—again, if you’re not stupid. I’ll be here brewing all day Saturday, so come by sometime. The time doesn’t matter. Speaking of—” She eyed the door in a way that showed that she very much meant to leave.

“You’re not going to kill this bottle with me?” Fabian asked, and he looked more put out by that than her blatant rejections of his advances. “I know you won’t drink it if you’re going to brew, because you’re so—”

“Smart and responsible? Yes. I know.” She smiled as she bent to kiss his cheek with great ease, and James unsurprisingly found that he didn’t much care for that either. “Give Gideon my love. I assume I’ll see you both tomorrow?”

“Yeah. It’s Friday, isn’t it? We don’t want Gran to kill us. I’ll get _her_ to finish this bottle with me.”

“You know, I think she probably will.” She patted his shoulder. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Sirius didn’t bother to hold back his grin. “She’s dismissing you, mate. This is how a woman tells you to get out of her house.”

“No, I’m dismissing myself,” Lily corrected. “I’m dismissing myself and also making it clear that Fabian is not to follow me and try to drink in my general vicinity, because he and Gideon and Dorcas are all banned from anywhere even close to a potion. They’re too bloody attention-seeking to let me work—like you when I heal, Sirius, come to think of it. Goodnight!”

She left without another word or a backwards glance.

Fabian watched her go, chuckling to himself. “She seems happy. Better than a couple days ago, to be sure. She has a purpose now, and that always makes her feel better.”

James hardly felt like getting told anything about how Lily felt. What was he, a stranger to her who didn’t know her at all?

“You do know she and James dated, right?” Sirius asked as James bent to put his sock and shoe back on. Although Sirius sounded altogether casual, his meaning came through loud and clear: he knew Fabian knew, and he didn’t like Fabian’s attitude towards her because of it, just like James didn’t.

“Yeah, Gid mentioned it last night. I’d forgotten. I didn’t know you lot at all then, so I didn’t remember. Why?”

If James hadn’t spent eighteen months with Fabian, he might have thought that Fabian was having him on, his question some sort of teasing torment meant to take the piss out of him.

But he _did_ know Fabian, and he knew Fabian didn’t have that sort of guile in him. Aside from jokes, everything he said could be taken at face value. He meant precisely what he said, and he wasn’t joking then.

“It’s weird for me to watch you try to get with her,” James said, straightening up.

He’d pegged it right. Fabian looked surprised, his previous question clearly genuine. “Is it really?” he asked, eyebrows high. “Mate, I don’t even remember the names of some of the girls I dated—what, three, four years ago? I wouldn’t care if anyone cracked on with them, not you two or Benjy or even Gid. Are you—wait, aren’t you seeing someone?”

James rather wished he’d never told Fabian that.

“Yes.”

“So why does it matter? You’ve got a girl, so it’s not like you’re planning on doing anything with Lily. Why is she off-limits?”

Really, James wished he could tell him.

He didn’t even _know_.

“It’s just weird,” he said finally. Fabian sighed a little. “What? It is. She wasn’t just some girl I dated. She was—”

She was what?

She was nearly the first everything he’d ever had? First crush? First shag? First love?

She was the worst thing he’d ever lost besides his parents, and just hearing Fabian and Gideon and Dorcas talk about her randomly throughout the past year and a half had brought all that loss back to the front of his mind?

She was somehow all that mattered to him nearly every time she was around, and in a way he didn’t understand?

“It was serious.” Even as James said it, the words fell short.

“Okay.” Fabian nodded slowly. “But you do get that I’ve been like this with her for months? Years, even? Gid too, although he’s sometimes worse with Dorcas. It’s just how I talk to her. We’re mates. We banter. I’m not doing it to make you kick off, but you have to understand—if she gave me the go-ahead, I’d be in there. Most blokes would. Plus, do you think she’s going to warn off any woman interested in you?”

No, but she wouldn’t. She’d never handled jealousy well, but, then again, neither had he. They’d started out bantering over it initially—her commentary at Hogwarts over girls disliking her for dating him; his constant need to note everything he thought about every stupid bloke who ever expressed an interest in her—but it had devolved when their relationship had started to falter. Towards the end, she could hardly stand the attention of the ‘broom chasers’ who would have gone home with him in a moment after a Quidditch match, and he’d gotten very bitter over how launching into the professional world had only made her come in contact with _more_ admiring men.

Yet she had more pride when it came to him than he did when it came to her. He knew that. She always had. She’d get into it with him—or maybe avoid him entirely—before she’d ever confront another woman for going after him.

“Can you try not to do it in front of me?” James asked instead of answering Fabian’s question, and Fabian continued to nod.

“Yeah, I’ll try. Again, though—this started up as soon as she started working with Rue and we became friends. It’s habit, so I might not always catch myself. And, also, I wasn’t totally kidding about there being a sort of open window for only a limited time that I’m trying to beat. I’ve watched her get snatched up before. You will too before she leaves, because I’ve never known her to go two months without going on at least one date. It’s clockwork. You’ll see.”

James would worry about that later.

“Thanks,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure he truly felt gratitude, and without even really contemplating what he meant to do, he stood and followed Lily.

He heard Sirius groan behind him, but hardly even registered the noise.

His ankle felt tight with each step he took up to the third floor, but it didn’t hurt. He’d spent so much time sitting all day that it felt good to stretch it, and while he didn’t bound up the stairs like he might have usually, he did take them faster than he assumed Lily would have liked to see.

He’d avoided the third floor as much as possible after his parents had died. In two years, he could count on one hand how many times he’d gone inside his bedroom or the corridor that led there. That door felt better if kept closed, because opening it felt like it might reveal the parts of him he’d pushed down, those broken fragments of the way he’d defined himself as a son that he’d lost all in one day. He found the carpeted corridor just as he remembered, and two of the four bedroom doors open, the two spares across from each other nearest the stairs. Soft music floated out of one of the bedrooms, and when he peeked inside, he found the room transformed.

Pieces of Lily lay strewn all over like relics, but not the sort of priceless relics Dumbledore sought. No, her relics were much more ordinary, things that a normal person might not notice, but that took him back to her room in her old flat with Dorcas and Mary.

Her slippers sat neatly beside the bed. They looked new, and he couldn’t remember what her old pair had looked like, but she’d always kept them right below her bedside table. The new ones were a cheerful red with a furry inside.

On her nightstand sat a stack of books, each one thicker than the next. One already lay next to her pillow on the neatly-made bed. She’d always kept a several books beside her, swearing a different mood made her reach for a different one, and she’d always made her bed as neat as a pin. She’d gotten after him more than once for getting up after her and not making it to her standards, or not making it at all.

She’d left the closet door open, and he could see her clothes hanging there, nearly all of them dresses, each organized carefully by color. She still favored greens and creams and blues. He’d always loved her most in black. He saw a single garment in that color and nothing else.

On the small writing desk lay several rolls of parchment, a trio of muggle notebooks, and a variety of writing utensils, both quills and ink as well as all manner of muggle pens and pencils and other things he couldn’t name but recognized from her desk in her old flat. On the wall around the desk, she’d put up over a dozen different pieces of parchment. He could see her neat handwriting on them all, and drawings on some—a picture of a cauldron, a fuzzy-looking plant, a thorny root. She’d done the same when they dated. She’d put up notes from her Healer training all around her desk in her tiny bedroom, which had become so voluminous by the time they broke up that they overtook nearly the entire wall. Seeing them in front of her helped her visualize things and retain them better, she swore, and she did retain knowledge with the same scary precision as Remus, so maybe she had a point there.

A package of Jaffa cakes sat open on the desk, one individually-wrapped cake sticking out of the cardboard box. Of all sweets—of all food, really—she’d always liked Jaffa cakes the most. Since they’d broke up, he hadn’t seen one without thinking of her.

“James?”

He jumped so hard he felt like he cleared a good foot below him.

When he turned, he saw that she stood in the doorway of the room across the hall, her wand in her fingers and her hair curling around her temples in the way it always had when she brewed. He’d admired it during Potions in all their years at Hogwarts, and seeing the tiny wisps of baby curls made him feel eighteen again.

“Do you need something?” She asked it as impersonally as if she were a barmaid enquiring if he needed his drink topped off.

“You said I could use the stairs.” He didn’t know where he pulled _that_ from, but it sounded like a valid point in his head.

“I didn’t mean these stairs.”

Yeah, that was a dismissal if he’d ever heard one.

He swallowed hard. “I wanted to thank you. For the flowers you sent to my parents’ funeral. I should have written then, but I didn’t—”

He’d thought on it after she’d left that morning, after he and Sirius had gone home and he’d showered the smell of smoke off himself and laid down in his bed. He’d played her words back about his parents, and did his best not to let memories get the better of him.

He knew she’d meant it when she’d said that she loved his parents. They’d loved her in turn, and it had all come flooding back right before he dropped off into a nap. Thoughts of his parents usually crept in just before sleep, when his defenses were weakened and he didn’t have the mental ability to push away the memories that came in those pre-sleep moments. Often, he thought of his parents’ faces as they’d looked just after they’d died. At their joint funeral, they’d looked more themselves, charms able to mask the green-and-purple rash of Dragon Pox that had turned their skin entirely green. But in their bedroom, where they’d expired side by side, they’d looked so unlike themselves that he could hardly believe that _his parents_ lay there dying. Surely, he’d thought as he watched their still, unconscious forms, _surely_ the people in front of him weren’t his parents, and Euphemia and Fleamont were off somewhere, laughing together in that annoyingly sweet way that they’d still managed after nearly fifty years together.

Reality had set in very, very slowly, and once it had, he’d wished he could go back to pretending.

His pre-sleep thoughts that day hadn’t involved anything like that. No, he’d thought of them alive and well, a welcome change in some ways, but also harder in others. Twenty years of loving memories of them had become tainted with their loss, bittersweet at best, achingly sad at worst. That morning, remembering Lily with his parents had vacillated between those feelings. He’d thought of her playing chess with his dad in his study, the game forgotten as they discussed potion-making. He’d thought of her taking off to shop with his mum, and how they had sometimes spent hours together that way, missing from breakfast until dinner. He’d thought of the countless meals they’d shared at his parents’ house, and of the times they had gone out together too, a double-date that nearly always came at his mum or Lily’s suggestion. He’d never minded. He’d liked holding her hand or resting his hand on her knee during dinner, and watching her drink wine until her cheeks flushed, her smile sweet and her conversation so natural that it felt like she’d always been a part of their family.

He’d thought of her parents too, of her mum’s warm but nervous disposition and her dad’s boisterous cheer. Meeting them had stressed him out to no end, because he’d known that Lily had complained about him over the years, and he’d had no idea if they could get past that. Yet they’d welcomed him without a second thought, and had taken to him faster than he could have ever hoped. Her dad had taken the mickey out of him over it occasionally, making passing jokes about boys pulling the pigtails of the girls they liked, and he’d wink at James then, his eyes the exact same shape and color as Lily’s.

Their parents had met more than once. Her parents had come to his parents’ house for dinner on a handful of occasions, and Lily’s mum always tried to look like she wasn’t overwhelmed with the size and luxury of their estate compared to the Evans’ comfortable but modest home. She had never quite gotten used to it.

One of the last times the six of them had gotten together, Euphemia had made an offhanded comment about a future wedding between their families. James had no idea why she’d said it, because he and Lily had never discussed anything close to marriage aside from references to a future five or ten years down the line. They’d talked about that often, although without using the M-word, even if they had hypothetically discussed the rest—where they each wanted to live, their thoughts on children, where they saw their careers going, and on and on, all questions meant to test their compatibility. Their desires had fit together incredibly well, but they’d never talked of marrying one another, even though they had both revealed that they wanted to get married someday. Yet Euphemia had just thrown the statement out casually, something like, _“Well, when they’re married—”_ and James had found himself unopposed to the idea.

Lily’s voice jerked him out of all the thoughts that had flashed through his mind in the blink of an eye. “It’s fine. Truly. I didn’t expect anything in return. That’s not why I sent them.”

Fuck, he wished he could read the expression on her face. He’d once understood her easily, with only the merest bit of a glance.

He’d clearly lost that skill when he lost her.

Why did just looking at her make him feel like he’d _lost_ her, when a few days ago he’d felt more or less fine without her in his life, missing her only when he heard her name mentioned in passing?

“You could have come to the funeral.” He scanned her face for any sign of a reaction, a furrowing of her brow or a smile or a downturn of her mouth or a blush or _something_ , because she clearly sought to contain her expression. She managed it well, at least for the most part. He saw something flash over her face, but she reigned it in quickly before he could think too hard on exactly what the look had meant. “I wouldn’t have minded.”

“I thought on it, but I didn’t want to make things harder for you. I knew they were hard enough.” She smoothed down the front of her dress, and he saw that she’d secured a brewing apron around her waist, as she always had when he’d watched her brew. He couldn’t remember what her old one looked like, but he knew it wasn’t the black apron edged in small ruffles that she’d tied in a neat bow, the numerous front pockets bulging presumably with potions odds and ends. “I went to their graves after. It’s a lovely spot.”

He hadn’t been since he’d watched them magically lower his parents’ coffins into the ground, but he knew what she meant. If not for the graveyard, the area in Godric’s Hollow where his dad had purchased plots was a beautiful place.

He’d never see it as beautiful, of course, but he could accept that objectively.

He swallowed several times. “That was nice of you.” He paused. “Remus told me about your mum and dad.”

“Yeah, he told me he did.”

He had to wonder exactly what else Remus had told her about what they’d talked about.

Hopefully nothing.

Hopefully.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he stopped there. He didn’t know what else to say.

“Thank you.”

An uneasy silence fell.

He looked past her into the bedroom she’d converted to a makeshift brewing lap. She had four cauldrons going at once, each with different levels of flames beneath them, two stirring themselves, the other two sitting stationary. She’d conjured a long table nearby, and she’d placed ingredients and tools and a thick, aged book, all carefully spread out with her customary neatness.

“I’ll set it all straight when I’m done,” she said, following his gaze. “Again, thank you for letting me stay here and brew here. It solved a lot of issues for me. But, look…” She paused, and he watched her twirl her wand between her fingers, a motion of clear nerves. “I know it’s strange that I’m here, so please don’t feel like you need to interact with me. I’ll be up here most of the time, and if I’m downstairs, I’ll cede whatever territory you want while you’re here. I know Dumbledore wants us to work some of this Order business together, but other than that, I’ll stay out of your way.”

He didn’t know what to say.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said finally, and she gave a strange half-smile in return.

“It’s nothing. I’ll see you Saturday.”

Talk about a dismissal.

She didn’t wait for a response. She turned on her heel and went over to the table, immediately engaging herself with the giant tome.

“Lily.”

She looked up, and he could finally read her expression then. Impatience fell all over her features.

“Yes?”

“Are you planning on leaving the wizarding world after you’re done brewing?”

He didn’t know quite where the thought came from, but once it had struck him, he knew even without her confirmation that he was right.

Impatience faded into surprise. “Yes. That’s my plan, one way or another.”

Surprise hit him as well. He hadn’t expected her to admit it.

“To do what?”

She shrugged her bared shoulders. “I have a couple different options. I haven’t decided, but that’s my business. Go ahead and tell everyone so Fabian and Gideon and Dorcas can react furiously. I’m sure you’ll love watching all that unfold.”

Truly, it was tempting. She absolutely wouldn’t listen to a single thing he said. He knew that without question. But the other three? She might listen there.

“Do you plan to go muggle?”

She sighed heavily. “James—”

“I won’t say anything. Is that your plan?”

She surveyed him for several long seconds, and he knew she took the measure of him, clearly wondering if she could trust him.

To his surprise, she decided she could.

“Mary moved to New York,” she said. A brief note of wistfulness entered her tone, but she caught herself and squashed it quickly. “There’s none of this blood status nonsense there. She couldn’t even get an interview here anywhere more than shopkeeping or bar service, but she got a job working in their government right away. We write a lot. She asked me to move there and room with her. I could finish Healer training. I wouldn’t have to alter my appearance to keep from getting ambushed. I could just _live_.”

“So you’d just leave everything? You can’t just—”

“I _can_. What’s left here for me? Mum and Dad are gone. Petunia and I will never speak again. I have friends, but that’s not enough to live a weird half-life trapped between the muggle and magical world. I’m tired of that. I’m tired of all of this.”

She really did look it, and it made him want to reach for her.

She’d said the same to him in the past, about the uncomfortable position she occupied as a muggleborn. In the wizarding world, her blood status had always mattered enough to alter the course of her life—although not as much as it clearly had in recent years. When they’d first started dating, just getting called “mudblood” and Slytherin harassment had been most of what she’d faced.

Things had gotten worse once they’d hit the real world, and worse still since they’d broken up.

At the same time, she had no place in the muggle world. She had no records to prove her education, no skills that would translate easily into any sort of career, and she would have to hide a huge piece of herself the entire time.

That brought him back to one of his initial questions.

“What’s your other option? Going full muggle?”

She didn’t mince words. “Yes.”

“You always said—”

“I know what I said.” Her words came out sharp, impatient once again. “It’s been three years since I’ve seen you, James. Things have changed for me. I imagine they have for you too. It’s changed how I look at things, but again, _this isn’t your business.”_

“I care about you.” The words tumbled out before he could stop them.

That strange half-smile appeared on her face again. He still couldn’t place what the hell it meant. “You care about me because of the way we were,” she said. “Things aren’t that way anymore. Don’t confuse the past with the present.”

At times during their relationship, he’d felt like she’d talked down to him. He’d told her as much, and she’d always tried to correct herself, but it had still snuck up unexpectedly, not often enough to be a true problem, but at least a handful of times. He’d joked that she couldn’t help it, because she was too bloody smart and she had to dumb things down for him to understand them, but it had annoyed him.

It had especially annoyed him at the end. She’d only done it once in the turbulent two months they spent breaking apart, when she’d tried to explain why their schedules would never come together to allow them to see each other. She’d said it in response to him wanting to wait things out, certain that _something_ would change just around the corner—he’d get time off, her workload would decrease, _something_. To hear her quash that so entirely and with such deliberate patience bordering on condescension—it had infuriated him. In turn, his refusal to acknowledge reality, optimistic to a fault, had driven her absolutely mad. He’d so often refused to see the true measure of things, simply because he hadn’t wanted to face them, which had left her shouldering the burden of those worries.

He felt eighteen again, but not as he had before. He felt eighteen as he had towards the end of their relationship, when they’d broken up just a month shy of his nineteenth birthday, and he’d been _miserable_ then.

“That’s not what I’m doing,” he insisted, and with more heat than he knew necessary or probably warranted, but he couldn’t manage to sound any other way. Then again, he didn’t really try. “I can care about you now, and I do. I fucking _loved_ you, Lily. It’s not like I just stopped wanting the best for you. I can’t do that, even if you can with me.”

“Don’t.” She matched his tone exactly. “You don’t get to tell me what I think or how I feel.”

“Then don’t tell me how _I_ feel. It goes both ways.”

Her impassivity broke.

“James, _what do you want?”_ She’d all but groaned the four words that had followed his name, and she reached up to touch her hair with both hands. If it had hung loose, he thought she might have pulled it out just then, because she looked frustrated beyond words. “Why did you come up here? What do you want me to do or say? You’re going to have to lay it out real fucking clear, because I can’t follow your logic. I _told you_ I’d stay out of your way. We don’t have to have this conversation. We don’t have to have _any_ conversation except those Dumbledore makes happen. Why are—”

“Then why did you tell me your plans?” he demanded. “Why would you tell me that when you won’t tell Gideon or fucking Fabian?”

As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t added the ‘fucking’ to Fabian’s name. It revealed a little too much about how the kitchen scene had made him feel.

Surprisingly, she didn’t jump at the opportunity to rake him over the coals for that. Instead, she went a different direction entirely.

“You asked. You asked, and I felt like I should tell you _something_ , so you wouldn’t think I plan to squat here after I’m done brewing. I don’t. You’ll have your place back, I’ll set everything right, so don’t—”

“Do you think that’s why I asked?” He stared at her in disbelief, because it clearly _was_ , or at least part of it. “Are you daft? Lily, I don’t care how long you stay here. Move in permanently if you want. It wouldn’t bother me.” Even as he said the words, he realized the truth behind them, and that truth sat uncomfortably on his chest. Fuck, it _should_ bother him, but it absolutely wouldn’t. “I asked because I don’t want you to fucking run away, because I _do_ care about you. That’s not—”

She cut him off. He knew he should have taken it at least passingly well, since he’d just done the same to her more than once, but it just sent him back to all the times they had rowed. Part of the reason they had never gotten _anywhere_ came down to their inability to let each other talk.

“ _‘Run away’?”_ she repeated, and when he heard it in her voice, he knew he should have phrased it a different way—not that he’d ever admit that to her. He wasn’t about to walk back any of his words. To do so would admit weakness. “You’re so—you don’t _get_ it. I used to think you did, but you clearly don’t anymore. James, people want to _kill_ me. Not just because I’m muggleborn—although because of that too—but because I’m _me_. You get to pick and choose your battles. You can go schmooze with the purebloods and have a laugh and a good time, and then fight them the next day if you want, but you also _don’t have to_. It’s a _choice_ for you. It’s not for me. We don’t all have your family name to hide behind.”

He found his hands in fists he didn’t mean to make. “That’s not fair. I’m not fucking _hiding_ , I’m trying to do what’s right and—”

“Great! Good for you! Do the right thing. Fight your fight. I’m tired of fighting. I’ve been dealing with this shit since I was eleven. I’ve never known a wizarding world where I belong like you do. I’m _tired._ I don’t want to deal with it anymore. Call it cowardice, I don’t care, but I think I deserve some fucking peace after a decade of this. That’s all I want.”

She clearly _did_ care if he called it cowardice. For a second, he considered pushing her further and saying just that, but the way her eyes flashed told him that was a very, very bad idea.

He shouldn’t have said what he said next either, but he still did.

“Are you going full muggle for the bloke you broke up with?”

If she had anything to throw, he thought she might have then. Unfortunately for her (and fortunately for him), only her precious potions ingredients and equipment surrounded her, and he doubted she’d throw those at Voldemort himself.

“What even—” Her cheeks flushed, dangerous and pretty all at once. “Of all the things that aren’t your business, that’s the _least_ your business. Why would that matter to you?”

He didn’t have an answer, but he really wished he did.

At the same time, he was glad he _didn’t_ have an answer, because he doubted he would have liked it.

She broke into the silence. “I know you’re dating someone. Dorcas told me last night. She said you’ve been with her for a while, so I assume it’s at least not some one-off, and might be relatively serious. I wasn’t even going to mention to you that I knew, because _it’s not my business_ , but I feel like I should right now just to point out that you don’t get to pry into my love life because you’re jealous, _especially_ because you’re _with someone else_ , you bleeding hypocrite. I never—”

He _was_ jealous. Of course he was. He hadn’t seen her since they’d broken up. Aside from the very last day of their relationship—and even then, if he was honest with himself—he’d looked at her as _his_ every day for over a year. That didn’t just _stop._

But he couldn’t very well admit that.

“I’m not jealous,” he insisted.

After all, how could he say anything else?

She scoffed. “Alright. Do you have something personal against Fabian then? Have you always disliked him, or is it a recent development because you’re worried I’ll bring him up here and give him the shag of his life?”

_Fuck_.

“Do you have to put it like that?” he snapped immediately. He hadn’t thought about it, but he realized that his words revealed his answer without directly addressing it. “I don’t think it’s weird to not want you to shag other blokes in my house. I think that’s a pretty reasonable boundary.”

“Great. I’ll go to his and shag him there. Happy?”

He didn’t even have to answer. He knew they both knew, and he had too much pride to admit it out loud.

“You don’t care that I’m with someone else?” He watched her eyes flash again, and deep, savage pleasure bloomed in his chest. _“You do.”_

He couldn’t remember the last time victory had tasted quite that sweet. Maybe not since playing Quidditch.

Surprisingly, she didn’t even try to deny it.

“Of course I do,” she said. “What did you say to me? I fucking _loved_ you. _Of course_ the idea of you with someone else bothers me. I hate it. But I also know that it’s not my place to get upset over something like that. It’s not yours either. Christ, I’m not even _with_ anyone.”

“What, and that makes it easier to watch Fabian try to get in you knickers every time you’re around each other?” He snorted. “How would you feel if—”

She cracked.

“That’s why I’m trying to avoid you!” She slammed her book shut with such force that he wondered if Sirius and Fabian had heard it downstairs. “I know that’s not easy for you! That’s why I left downstairs just now, and why I did my best last night not to banter with him or Gideon like I normally would! I’m doing that _for you,_ you prat, because I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable! Fuck, James, I made them leave the kitchen last night mostly because they were talking about Rick, and I didn’t want you uncomfortable over that either! Don’t fucking come at _me_ for the things other people do or say. I can’t control—”

“You’re right.”

The red fury in her face didn’t fade at all, but she did stop her tirade.

“You’re right,” he repeated. It tasted bitter to admit it. “I remember how you used to banter with me, so I know you could make me miserable if you wanted. Seeing you like that with someone else _would_ make me miserable.”

He suddenly felt as she looked: exhausted.

She sat heavily on the nearby bed and cradled her head in her hands. “What do you want from me, James?”

Seeing her on a bed, he suddenly had about a dozen ideas as to what he wanted, but he doubted she wanted to hear any of them.

“I don’t know.” It was mostly the truth.

“Are we going to do this over and over if I stay here? Do you want me to leave? Is that why you’re doing this?”

Well, fuck.

How could that make him feel any way but terrible?

“No. No, I don’t want you to leave. I told you, I don’t care how long you stay. I meant it.” He took a step towards her, but stopped himself. The nervous excitement that always appeared around her had skyrocketed with a single step, and he knew exactly what he’d do if he got too close to her.

She caught him out.

All it took was her lifting her head and looking at him, and then she began to laugh, although not with great humor. It sounded like disbelief.

“Are you kicking off like this just because you want to shag me?” she demanded. “Is that all this is? Holy shit, _it is._ That’s entirely why you’re acting like this.”

He had no idea how to respond to that.

“That’s…not entirely it.”

“But in large part?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Is this because I made that joke last night when I was on my knees? Look, I just meant to—”

“No, I was already thinking it. I started thinking about it as soon as you vanished my shirt. It just _happens_ around you.”

For several tense seconds, neither of them spoke.

“Lily—” He didn’t know where he planned to take things once he’d started, but it took everything in him to say what he absolutely didn’t want to say. “I should go.”

She nodded slowly. “You should. Like I said, I’ll stay out of your way. That should make things easier.”

Something about the way she said it had him convinced she didn’t just mean _for you_.

It sounded like, _that should make things easier for us_.

He licked his lips. “Do you—”

She didn’t even need him to finish the question. “Do you want me to answer that? Will any good come of it either way?”

Well, a world in which she wanted him too seemed infinitely better than one where she didn’t, but he also saw her point.

But if she said that she did want him—

He didn’t trust himself.

“You don’t need to stay out of my way.”

She gave him a long, exasperated look. “Don’t I?”

He didn’t so much as stop in the kitchen to say goodbye to Sirius and Fabian before he left. Truly, he didn’t have to. He knew they’d hear him slam the front door on his way out (and he could hear his mum’s voice, sharp and annoyed, getting after him for it), and could easily surmise that he didn’t intend to come back inside.

He Disapparated to Esther’s flat.


End file.
